From the annals of astounding coordination, this head-scratcher reported to me yesterday by Ellen Kaisse.
— EK: See bold-face below. I had to read it twice to see why I was having trouble parsing it.
The unfortunate pivot
January 25, 2024
Cities of Z, found and lost
January 24, 2024From my 1/2/24 posting “Z of the Amazon”, about:
Amazonian linguist Roberto Zariquiey, whose home base is the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). His unusual Z-surname caught my attention; it turns out that almost all the Zariquieys in the world come from Spain, or from what is pretty clearly a Spanish settlement, in Peru
I wrote RZ about his name (Z-names are a thing with me; hey, I’m a linguist and a Z-person), expecting that someone with so many academic and language-activist commitments wouldn’t be inclined to spend time satisfying the onomastic curiosity of a stranger (though he’s a linguist and would know about some of my work). In the meantime, origins in Spain and a name with a notable Z and Q in its Spanish spelling had a whiff of the Basque about it, so I searched through lists of common Basque surnames, but without success.
Eventually I got an informative and entertaining response from RZ, confirming my Basque suspicions: Zariquiey is a Basque name, altered from Zariquiegui, the name of a small town. So: a found city of Z (more below).
But then RZ added a fun bonus for me (slightly edited by me):
Are you aware of the story of the City of Z in the Amazon? An English guy, Percy Fawcett, was obsessed with it and actually got lost trying to find it. This book is pretty good: The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
Not just a (well-reviewed) book, but an ambitious movie (also well-reviewed, though not a financial success) in addition. And no, I somehow wasn’t aware of them. In any case: a lost city of Z (more below).
Snowball rock
January 24, 2024Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, celebrating the seasonal rock band Icy/D.C. (Wayno’s title: “Seasonally Appropriate Music”), also today’s somewhat desperate affirmation that I am indeed, like Mary, Queen of Scots, not dead yet:
(#1) A dark midwinter — how can there still be a week of January to go? — punning tribute to the band AC/DC (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Read the rest of this entry »
Cave canem
January 23, 2024The Dave Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 4/24/18, with a fresh take on dogs to beware of: not vicious guard or attack dogs, but hyperkinetic emotional-support dogs overwhelming passing pedestrians by lavishing empathetic concern on them:
(#1) An especially nice touch is the dog saying — this is cartoonland, where animals talk, in English — that it can smell the hurt, the cluster of emotional states that give off markers that many dogs can in fact smell and interpret
Dragons to appreciate
January 22, 2024In the wake of my 1/19 posting “Appreciate my dragon”, about 1/16, Appreciate a Dragon Day, this image posted yesterday on Facebook by Marina Muilwijk, from the For the Love of Dragons group, where it was posted by Yvette Marie:
Do we contain multitudes?
January 21, 2024Two cockroaches, you have a couple of unpleasant bugs. Undulating masses of cockroaches streaming over all the surfaces in a room, you’ve got a shudder-provoking pest infestation. (I’ve had the latter experience with Argentine ants, and it was the stuff of nightmares for weeks.) But when does the former turn into the latter? This is the question asked by self-aware cockroaches in this cartoon by Lonnie Millsap in the 1/29/24 print-edition New Yorker:
(#1) Cucarachas conscientes de ellas mismas, addressing the puzzle in the sorites paradox / the paradox of the heap
Appreciate my dragon
January 19, 2024I recently discovered (through friends on Facebook) that 1/16 is Appreciate a Dragon Day — an excellent occasion, in my view. How do I appreciate my dragon? Let me count the ways.
One, dragons have picked up a ton of gay vibes (there are lots of rainbow dragons around, many on the cute side, but some fierce), and I am way gay; two, a Year of the Dragon is the upcoming year (beginning on 2/10/24) in the 12-year cycle of the lunar calendar and I am in fact a dragon, born in the dragon year 1940; and three, since dragons are (fanciful) gigantic serpents, they are natural phallic symbols, really big and powerful penises (the objects of my desire), frequently with wings, and that means they slot right into my sexual fantasies. Il y a un dragon dans mon lit!
(#1) On the kisspng images site: a rainbow Chinese dragon, by Oluoko
Pain and persecution
January 18, 2024I woke this morning screaming “oh fuck! oh Jesus fuck!” with pain (in my hip, knee, finger, and wrist joints, all at once), after the worst persecution nightmare that I can recall (the thin veneer of tolerance and acceptance that normally papers over deep fear of and contempt for the Other is aroused by labeling us as aliens who are poisoning society and moves neighbors and friends to cleanse their world of the poison by hunting us down and slaughtering us). And a nonfunctional day yesterday (1/17, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky’s death day, back in 1985, routinely puts me into a tailspin, and the weather is almost always appalling). I’m thoroughly shaken, bewildered about how to get through the day. Eventually the panicked spike in my blood pressure subsided and I pushed through the pain to get myself breakfast. Now I’m sitting quietly in my chair at my worktable, trying to move my body as little as possible while still typing a posting.
1/17 is also Benjamin Franklin’s birthday (in 1706 rather than 1937), and normally that would give me a way lighten the sorrow with some of the remarkable and risqué details of his life. And I have just discovered that 1/16 was Appreciate a Dragon Day, which I should certainly celebrate publicly (and hope to be able to do so soon): dragons have picked up a ton of gay vibes — there are lots of rainbow dragons around, many on the cute side, but some fierce — plus a Year of the Dragon is the upcoming year (beginning on 2/10/24) in the 12-year cycle of the lunar calendar and I am in fact a dragon, born in the dragon year 1940.
Meanwhile, dark midwinter continues, as always, with the birthday (on 1/22) of my man Jacques Transue (who died in 2003). While, on a much more pleasant birthday front, I was so wrapped up in my medical treatments that I failed to celebrate the 1/9 birthday of Joan Baez, very much still alive and just a bit younger than I am, just a bit older than Jacques.
Meanwhile, I stumble unhappily through the day.
Dinos in bed
January 16, 2024Now that I have the three Dinos books (Dinosaur Therapy, Dinosaur Philosophy, Dinosaur Friendship), I’ve found further poignant Dino strips about what I called deep friendship in my 1/8 posting “The best bits of me”. Deep friendship is also known as a kind of love: philia, the love that friends have for one another (as distinguished from eros, romantic or sexual love). That has brought me to strips in which two of the Dino characters are attached erotically as well as philically — notably, this delightful “big bed” strip from 2022, involving the two characters the creators refer to as red and blue (called Brn and Blu in my earlier posting):
(#1) Bed space is nice, but the embrace of your lover is even nicer
The creators of the comic have gone to some trouble not to gender the two characters; they differ in color, but otherwise they’re identical in appearance. This means that #1 can be — though it doesn’t have to be — understood as showing same-sex eros. With this remarkable result, as reported by the creators on Twitter (now called X) on 6/16/22:
this comic was too much for Instagram and they deleted it
Consequently, the strip didn’t come up in my earlier net searches, which turned out to depend on Instagram; I didn’t discover it until I got my copy of Dinosaur Friendship. I am offended.
Morning names: kelp and skulk
January 15, 2024Immediately, I thought: Kelp and Skulk, Attorneys at Law, famously slimy and devious. But what came into my head on awakening was just the noun kelp, for the algae; and the verb skulk, roughly ‘lurk’. Suspiciously similar to one another phonologically. If you combine them, you get the name of a common fish, the scup. And each of them spins off a huge range of phonologically similar and possibly thematically related words.
I did have an idea of how kelp and skulk got into my head — through a proper name that’s phonologically similar to both of my morning names: the surname Delk. The last name of a character on the American tv show The Closer, which I’d watched two episodes of last night: Thomas “Tommy” Delk, a fictional Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (beautifully portrayed by Courtney B. Vance).
Scup the fish and Delk the cop:
(#1) Stenotomus chrysops, a porgy; and (#2) Tommy Delk, a chief
