This morning’s surprise name was Ronald Arbuthnot(t) — which led me nowhere, until I realized that the (very British) name was just the beginning of the name of Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, who is a figure of considerable interest. (The surname Arbuthnot(t) is Scottish.) Knox leads to the fictional detective Miles Bredon and to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
Morning: Ronald Arbuthnott Knox
April 13, 2015Drag mashups
April 12, 2015In the March-April 2015 issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review, the piece “Ryan Landry of the ‘Make ’Em Laugh’ School”, in which Jim Farley interviews Landry. From Farley’s intro:
A comic playwright and impresario of drag theater, his parody productions of classic movies, fairy tales, TV shows, and plays have long been a staple of Provincetown and Boston entertainment. More recently, along with his company, the Gold Dust Orphans, Landry has expanded his satiric reach to New York and beyond.
… While he acts and often sings in most of his shows, Landry’s major gift is the ability to turn out hilarious camp burlesques with a punk attitude, sort of like Charles Ludlum crossed with Courtney Love. The titles of his bawdy pop culture mash-ups — of everything from classic films to classic rock — perhaps say it best: Phantom of the Oprah, Silent Night of the Lambs, Mary Poppers, Pornochio, Snow White and the Seven Bottoms, and on and on.
Wonderful titles, reminiscent of the language-play titles that are so popular with makers of porn flicks — on (some of) which, see my posting “Porn titles” of 3/21/11, where you can find, among others:
Catcher in the Fly, Fist and Shout, Terms of Endowment, Field of Creams, Blond Leading the Blond
Becoming a surrealistic cartoonist
April 12, 2015Today’s Zippy, about the route to being a surrealist(ic) cartoonist:
Abandon plot, logic, and punchline. And embrace the meta.
Sunday Pun
April 12, 2015Today’s Bizarro, with an outrageous play on The Mummy’s Curse (the movie):
(#1)
Spring Sonata
April 12, 2015(About music rather than language.)
On the radio show Exploring Music by Bill McGlaughlin (from WFMT in Chicago, but I get it through WQXR in New York), this week (April 6 – 10) was Spring is Here week:
Spring is in the air as we celebrate the coming of flowers and sunshine from under the melting winter ice here on Exploring Music. Vivaldi, Strauss, Chopin and more.
Much wonderful music. For me, the highlight of the week was Beethoven’s “Spring Sonata” (Frühlingssonate) : the Violin Sonata No. 5 in F major, Opus 24 (1801).
The devouring penguin
April 11, 2015Passed along by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, this image from Archie McPhee’s Geyser of Awesome on tumblr:
Australian photographer Gordon Tait captured this awesome shot of an Adélie penguin attempting to devour his GoPro camera on the Antarctic ice near Casey Station
Two obits
April 11, 2015In my print copy of the NYT yesterday, two notable obits, for Ralph Sharon (the musician) and Richard Dysart (the actor).
Briefly: initial-based crime dramas
April 11, 2015Now appearing every so often on the USA Network (American cable), an entertaining commercial for the network, touting the “initial-based crime dramas” (like NCIS and CSI) viewable on it, and bursting out in a fountain of initialisms of all sorts (OMG etc.).
I haven’t been able to find a video of the commercial or a transcript of it, but I’m hoping that one or another of these will eventually be available to report on here.
Ambling though television
April 11, 2015(Mostly about American tv shows and movies, and actors in them, rather than language. An adventure in pop culture.)
My posting “The hotel con” ended with the tv show Hotel, with Connie Sellecca as one of its three principal players. She leads us to The Greatest American Hero, whose three principal players were William Katt, Robert Culp, and Sellecca. Katt leads us to the Perry Mason series, whose two principal players were Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale. Culp leads us to I Spy, whose two principal players were Bill Cosby and Culp. And Burr takes us on to Ironside (and homosexuality in Hollywood). Other tv shows and some movies appear on this tour (which focuses on tv shows I’ve especially enjoyed), as do other reliable and interesting actors.
No vowels
April 11, 2015In the April 13th New Yorker, a Talk of the Town piece “The Musical Life: New Translation” by Alec Wilkinson about Cassandra Wilson:
The title of the Egyptian funerary papyrus “Book of the Dead” is more accurately translated as “Coming Forth by Day.” It was called “Book of the Dead” by Wallis Budge, who translated the manuscript for the British Museum, in 1895. “Coming Forth by Day” is also the title of Cassandra Wilson’s new record, which is an homage to Billie Holiday, who would have turned one hundred on April 7th.
The other morning, Wilson visited the Egyptian wing of the Met, waiting in the security line among schoolchildren on field trips.
… “I’ve been fascinated by Egyptology for ten years,” she said. “Ancient Egypt was called Kmt. Their language didn’t have vowels, much like Hebrew. The Greeks called the people from Kmt the Aegyptos. ‘Kemetic’ is how you refer to the culture. The Kemetics didn’t believe in death. They believed that you were always coming back and forth from the unknown to the actual. Going to the afterlife they referred to as ‘westing,’ since the sun set in the west. For me, the thought of Billie Holiday’s spirit being reinvented in the twenty-first century connected with the concept of returning, of coming forth by day.”
Whoa! The writing system is not the language. The Ancient Egyptian writing system didn’t have symbols for vowels, but the language certainly had them. Every language does.