So cries Ruthie (in an old One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed this morning), objecting to what she saw as her mother’s accusation that she and her brother Joe were being like pets:
Here Ruthie shows an admirable appreciation of the English derivational suffix –y ‘relating to, like, resembling’, while betraying her ignorance of the adjective petty ‘of little importance’ (which is not pet + –y).
The liver. Patent medicine. Greek mythology. Advertising. The illustrator’s art. All together now.
In the hands of French illustrator Charles Lemmel (1899 – 1976), the task of devising a poster to advertise a hepatical (a patent medicine for maladies of the liver) somehow fixed on the myth of Prometheus, punished by Zeus (for having stolen fire from Olympus and given it to humans) by being chained, naked, to the side of a mountain and subjected to endless hepatophagy: every day, Zeus’s eagle feasts on the Promethean liver, which then regrows for the next day’s torture.
Not, you might have thought, an ideal theme for a medicine ad; but look what Lemmel did with the idea in the poster (from the 1930s):
(#1) Lemmel presents Hepatior as a rest and relief from the pain of hepatic ailments, a pain like that of Prometheus’s aquiline torment; meanwhile, he elevates the real-life sufferer by depicting the suffering Prometheus as a hot hot muscle-hunk and also a curly black-haired Greek dude — who is smiling and winking at us through the ordeal, reassuring us that it’s all a joke
That’s quite an artistic performance, also soft porn at several levels (extravagant body display, proud masochism). I happen to think it’s deeply silly, but enjoyable in its crudeness.
I haven’t been coping well with daily life for a while now, but see no reason to issue fresh bulletins on my anxieties, incapacities, and infirmities in these difficult times, so I’ve been posting on things that entertain me and might entertain you, often just the wispiest of notes in the spirit of the Pythonic Mary, Queen of Scots. As here, with a report on what I had for lunch today — and yesterday too, but it was much better the second day.
Better The Second Day, a general principle for most hot soups, and a variety of other foods too. In this case, for lamb and spinach curry (with fenugreek leaves): so, palak mathi gosht plus a lot of basmati rice, from Zareens (a Z! a good omen) Indian restaurant on Broadway in Redwood City CA:
palak ‘spinach’; methi ‘fenugreek leaves’; gosht, literally ‘meat’, specifically referring to goat, mutton, or lamb
From Alaskan Chris Waigl on Facebook on 4/20, who commented “Great logo” (to which I assent):
SEAGLA (Southeast Alaska LGBTQ+ Alliance: “providing a supportive social network for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in Southeast Alaska”) announcement on 4/18 for Juneau pride week, June 14th – 23rd
Alaskan images, going through the rainbow flag from red to purple, with a few touches of pink. From the SEAGLA site:
We’re so excited to reveal this year’s Pride logo! It’s designed by Lillian Egan (@diamond.lils.art on Instagram) and Mel Izard (@thetoadstoes).
I had hoped to get a detailed inventory of the items in the logo, since they are supposed to characterize (southeast) Alaska, but will be seen by many outsiders (by me in particular, and now by my readers around the world); that is, they convey more than generic allusions to tall trees, wolves, porcupines, crabs, bears, and so on. What jellyfish? What caterpillar? What (two types of) mushrooms? But no responses so far.
The Pearls Before Swine strip of 4/21 has cartoonist Stephan Pastis committing a formula pun joke, a genre of humor at which he’s a master:
(#1) Pig assembles, for Goat as his straight man, the parts of an outrageous pun on the first two lines of the Beatles’ song “Something”: Something in the way she moves / Attracts me like no other lover (and then in the last, frame-breaking, panel, Goat upbraids Pastis for exploiting him for the sake of a joke)
So, two things: formula pun jokes; and the song “Something”.
Today, a long guest posting on intellectual history, specifically on the transmission of ideas in linguistics, in particular on the innovation and spread of linguistic terminology. This is an immensely scholarly follow-up to my 4/15/24 posting “Greek-letter variables and the Sanskrit ruki class”, in which I reproduced a 1970 Linguistic Inquiry squib of mine with that title and wrote:
and then there’s the question of the useful ruki terminology, whose history [the Indo-Europeanist Michael L. Weiss (Professor of Linguistics and Classics at Cornell)] has been trying to trace (this squib might have been the source of its spread throughout the linguistic literature)
Today’s guest post is the current fruit of Michael Weiss’s RUKIstorical investigations, with minimal intrusions in his text by comments from me.
… many people’s reaction to the cartoon psychiatrist (in my 4/20 posting “Charlie on the couch”) admitting to her patient Charlie the StarKist tunafish:
you’re my first patient with a fear of not being eaten
Well, not an everyday word, but a specialized medical term, a bit of arcana from abnormal psychology.
There are, remarkably, two terms (one using the Latin ‘devour’ stem, one the corresponding Greek ‘eat’ stem) for ‘fear of being eaten’, so from these we can compose terms for ‘fear of not being eaten’.
Here you will object that this is a profoundly silly exercise; surely, such a term would have no utility in the real world. But no, there turns out to be a documented paraphilia centered on a erotic desire to be eaten (in the imagination), and in the world of this kink — very far from a top paraphilia, but a real thing — fear of not being eaten, of not having this desire satisfied, would also be a real thing.
Viewed yesterday morning: S4 E7 of the tv show Columbo — “An Exercise in Fatality”, originally aired 9/15/74, with four members of the bank of reliable actors with prodigious portfolios that I’ve called the Acting Corps (four plus series star Peter Falk, playing Lt. Columbo) appearing in the early moments of the show, in which character Milo Janus is depicted as a cocky fraudster running a chain of gyms, confronted by one of his defrauded franchisees, Gene Stafford. It is quickly clear that one of these men will be murderer and one victim, but unclear which will be which: Janus richly deserves to get offed, but on the other hand, he’s bastard enough to dispose of Stafford as a mere obstacle in his path.
The plot is nicely balanced between these two possibilities, but I should have realized from the casting how the scene would play out; both characters were cast from the Acting Corps, but Janus is played by a high-recognition, star actor (Robert Conrad), while Stafford is played by character actor Phil(ip) Bruns, who had a supporting role, at one time or another, in virtually every American tv series there was then, so always seemed vaguely familiar but not identifiable.
The character Stafford was then doomed, because the actor playing him was dispensable. Not only was Robert Conrad a star, he was also an incandescent actor: body-proud (displaying his muscular torso and remarkable buttocks), high-masculinity (energetic and athletic, tough, frequently sweaty, giving off a whiff of testosterone), and intense. No director would kill off a property like that in the first few minutes of a 90-minute show.
I originally intended to post about four of the actors from this episode — Conrad, Bruns, Pat Harrington, Jr. (who I recognized and identified immediately), and Gretchen Corbett (who was familiar but not identifiable) — but I quickly accumulated a lot of material about Conrad, so I’m giving him a posting all of this own; I’ll do the other three in a separate posting.
It’s April 20th, and the plants on my patio are into late spring mode: the last course of cymbidiums opening up their flower buds as the earlier courses come to an end (these will come to their own end in six weeks or so); meanwhile, my bigleaf hydrangea has shot up into a mass of dark green leaves, with shoots now filled with buds that will open up into bright pink umbels in a week or so. All this an occasion for taking my new little camera out of doors. So I have a couple of photos for you.
