In the June 1st New Yorker, a brief piece “Stormy Weather: Sam Waterston plays Prospero, at the Delacorte” by Hilton Als:
(#1)
Illustration by Simón Prades
Sam Waterston
May 31, 2015Ruthie and large-scale formulas
May 30, 2015Yet another cartoon for this Saturday: a One Big Happy:
Ruthie tackles a large-scale formula here — one that has no words rare in her experience, but they’re assembled in a way that makes no sense to her, so she mentally makes large-scale adjustments.
Shifty Grades of Fey
May 30, 2015Today’s, groan, Bizarro:
An elaborate play on the title of E. L. James’s 2011 erotic romance novel, Fifty Shades of Grey, with a rhyme substitute for each of the content words — shifty for fifty, grades for shades, Fey for grey — with the whole business worked into a fresh scenario.
A phonologist’s cartoon
May 30, 2015A cartoon for phonologists, by a phonologist, Stephanie Shih (posted here with permission):
A pun on the organic of organic farming and the organic of the technical term homorganic in phonology.
Recursive giraffe
May 30, 2015In searching for some other cartoons yesterday, I came across this entertaining New Yorker cartoon by Farley Katz:
Yes, a recursive giraffe: each of its “horns” (technically, ossicones) is a giraffe, and each of their horns is a giraffe, and so on.
Earworms, snowmen, and parodies
May 30, 2015In the June 1st New Yorker, this cartoon by Bob Eckstein:
(#1)
Not the first posting on this blog about earworms.
Faith vs. WF in the magazine world
May 29, 2015From The Atlantic‘s March 2015 issue, “Mind the Gap: As more U.K. publications woo U.S. readers, British and American English are mixing in strange, sometimes baffling, ways” by Sophie Gilbert, beginning:
Imagine first making someone’s acquaintance, perhaps in a classroom or an office, and having him immediately and unabashedly ask you for a rubber. Is he gleefully transgressing normal social boundaries? Is he drunk? Is he brandishing a pencil?
Such are the choppy and perilous waters that have long divided American and British English.
(covered recently in my posting “Rubber trees, rubber plants”).
This is a lexical difference, but there are also spelling differences, punctuation differences, and more, all of which present difficulties for publications with writers and readers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Kids these days
May 29, 2015Today’s One Big Happy, in which Joe seems not to be fully plugged in:
What comes at the end? A top-level domain name, of course, or so thinks a child in these modern times.
And then, as an bonus, Ruthie mistakes her dad’s Y (the letter name) for why (the question word).
Insult for fun
May 29, 2015Today’s Dilbert has Alice persecuting the pointy-headed boss:
She has him over a barrel, as the saying goes.
Another round with Schlitzie
May 29, 2015Today’s Zippy returns to one of Bill Griffith’s preoccupations, the pinhead Schlitzie (Simon Metz) from Tod Browning’s Freaks:
On this blog, on 4/19/15, a posting with a Zippy on Pip and Flip Snow, other pinheads from Tod Browning’s Freaks, plus a list (with links) of earlier postings on Schlitzie, including three Zippys (1/8/11, 8/7/13, 8/18/13). Griffith keeps re-telling the story.