Today’s Pearls Before Swine continues the strip’s recent indulgence in meta-commentary:
(#1)
Think of the children!
Oh, that stoned.
(#2)
June 16th (today’s date) is a triple occasion: Bloomsday, the anniversary of the Zwicky – Daingerfield wedding, and my stepson Kit’s birthday. This Sunday is also Commencement Day at Stanford and Father’s Day.
An Andy Singer No Exit cartoon, accompanying Anthony Gottlieb’s review of Ruth R. Wisse, No More: Making Jewish Humor, NYT Book Review 6/2/13, pp. 38-9:
Two parallel puns, on practicing and on observant.
Today’s Pearls Before Swine:
The -’s possessive is multiply ambiguous, and that ambiguity can be exploited for language play. A few days ago, I posted about the greeting card caption “Here’s your dick in a card” (#3), turning on your dick ‘a/the dick for you’ vs. ‘the dick that belongs to you’. Now we have the the cat’s meow (idiomatic) ‘something/someone excellent’ vs. the (unlikely but possible) compositional ‘the meow that belongs to the cat’ (or possibly ‘the meow for the cat’, also compositional).
Bill is both the cat’s meow and the dog’s ruff.
Bravo has been doing re-runs of Inside the Actors Studio shows, several each morning. A few days ago, Mike Myers (actor, comedian, singer, screenwriter, and film producer) was up, so the hour was packed with plenty of good-natured bad taste. A fair amount of time was devoted to Myers’s 2008 comedy The Love Guru, which aroused much critical venom when it came out (I haven’t seen it). Myers was especially pleased with an elaborate double entendre in the movie — the information, or advice:
Liquor up front, poker in back.
(That is, either there is liquor up front — in the front of this place — and poker in (the) back; or you should lick her up front and poke her in back.) Yes, tasteless.
In a mailing from the Association for Psychological Science, an abstract for this fascinating-sounding article (by Yigal Attali) in Psychological Science (April 29, 2013):
Perceived Hotness Affects Behavior of Basketball Players and Coaches
Ah, you ask, whose perceived hotness? And perceived by whom? Many people think that basketball players are hot hot hot, and I assume the players know this, so it might well affect their behavior.
Oh, not that kind of hot. [Emily Litella mode] Never mind.
In my e-mail today, a sale on gay greeting cards from the 10PerCent company. Reproduced here are the fronts of four birthday cards, starting with a phallic number (with an ambiguity inside), going on through two that look more promising (until you get to the sexual ambiguity inside) and one with the ambiguity on the front (and an innuendo inside).
(On Weinergate, see here.) Widely reported on the net. Surely intentional. This is the Post, after all. Now from the same source, we get this double-entendre paraphrase of Weiner’s words:
What the story said:
Anthony Weiner was still playing coy yesterday about entering the mayoral race, but if he gets in, he said, he intends to be a real contender.
“If I decide to run, it’s because I think I can win,” he told reporters outside his Park Avenue South apartment. Anthony Weiner was still playing coy yesterday about entering the mayoral race, but if he gets in, he said, he intends to be a real contender.
“If I decide to run, it’s because I think I can win,” he told reporters outside his Park Avenue South apartment.
Some responses to my posting on masturbation in the showers at UMass Amherst, plus the speech verb ejaculate in ADS-L.
