Curtains
On Facebook on 5/28, Bert Vaux reported on responses to a query of his on curtains vs. drapes. On that posting, an incidental comment by Heidi Harley: Did anyone [among BV’s respondents] mention that...
View ArticleLike a Spanish cow
Very briefly noted, this morning’s morning name, the stock insult in French: parler français comme une vache espagnole, literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’, conveying ‘to speak French badly’...
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Monsters
In the new issue of the New Yorker (9/29/25), two monsters stalk the cartoons in its pages: Joe Dator’s hysterically creepy Wine That Breathes (It’s alive!) and Michael Maslin’s Cyclops waiter at work...
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All That Jazz
The song, from the 1975 musical Chicago, which has been in my head constantly the past couple of days, thanks to my coming across a vein of brief retro-choreography performances of it by the dance pair...
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Hallucinated proverbs
In the Business section of WIRED Daily, a piece by Brian Barrett on 4/23/25 with the headers: ‘You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice’: Google Failures Highlight a Fundamental AI Flaw Google’s AI Overviews...
View ArticleSucking the life out of the state
Returning to a very old topic on this blog, making small advances on some outstanding puzzles. It starts with my 6/8/11 posting (yes, 14 years ago) “Parasites and the body politic”, about my dismayed...
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Today’s truly terrible pun
(Not suitable for kids or the sexually modest) Ok, one more little posting before I tackle writing about the last week in my life, parts of which were spectacularly awful, but through most of which I...
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Idiom come to life
A cartoon by Suerynn Lee in the New Yorker issue of 10/14/24: (#1) We’re … we’re … like two peas in a pod! Those peas really know their idioms. The peapod pendant. From my 8/5/23 posting of this name,...
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This idiom has had the radish
In e-mail on 9/24 from Masayoshi Yamada, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Shimane University (author of, inter alia: A Dictionary of Trade Names and A Dictionary of English Taboo and Euphemism),...
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The cartoon glory that was Rome
In this morning’s comics feed, two linguistic jokes from the Roman Empire (in a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro); maybe it’s just something in the air, but on the other hand, September 4th, 476, marks...
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Formulaic happiness
In today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange, the clams are tenting tonight on the old campground, but find today’s experience to be unaccountably joyless; for some reason, the formulas just aren’t...
View ArticleThe potluck surprise
From Sunday’s’s (7/21) New York Times Magazine, in the section “The Ethicist: Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman”: Angel writes: My co-worker Nick suggested we have a baked-goods potluck at work. I...
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Datoro!
Two Datoro cartoons from the July 22nd New Yorker (the one with Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice” — six 45s and three women — on the cover): Joe Dator offering goldfish snacks in a cat bar, Tom Toro...
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Six Zippy balls
Zippy is known for his enthusiasm for specific words, is given to playing with them in public. Today’s Zippy strip shows our Pinhead drifting happily through six encounters with ball, in the title (In...
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The Putin-on-Ritz pun
Passed on by Susan Fischer yesterday, this item from the We Love PUNS site: (#1) Three things you need to know about or recognize to understand the pun joke here: Vladimir Putin (depicted here without...
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Two cartoons on (unstated) formulaic themes
Aka: Piccolo’s bull and Rubin’s cow: cattle days in CartoonLand. A little post-eclipse diversion: cartoons that make allusion to, or illustrate a pun on, some formulaic expression, but without actually...
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Nobody expects a baby
A carefully composed, subtle, and surprising ambiguity-driven cartoon by Mick Stevens in the New Yorker 1/1&8/2024 issue (on-line on 12/2/23): Were we expecting a baby?, conveying not ‘Were we...
View ArticleKissing the proverbial you know what
From the Raw Story site, “‘The stain is on you’: Ex-RNC chair slams GOP for silence on [GP]’s call for blood purity” by Matthew Chapman on 12/18/23 (in this story [GP] refers to (Helmet) Grabpussy),...
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Packing Extreme Meat
(A lot of this posting is about the title of a Lucas gay porn movie, slated for full release in March 2024, but with its scenes being released one by one before then — the first, baldly titled “Dom...
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Fur stoles, furry boots, and f*cking like minks
(Note this posting’s title — it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest) It’s all about fucking in fur: two scenes from the MEN.com gay porn flick Norse Fuckers in which men mate wildly and...
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