Garfield Minus Garfield

John Beavers writes from the University of Texas to recommend (to Elizabeth Traugott and me) the comic strip (of sorts) Garfield Minus Garfield:

The creator [Dan Walsh] basically just took Garfield strips [by Jim Davis] and removed Garfield but left everything else unchanged, so now Jon is basically just talking to himself.  It’s amazing the effect it has — a strip that normally is at best mildly amusing becomes a stark and unforgiving treatise on loneliness and deep existential crisis.

Oh my, yes.

More alliteration

Bill Griffith returns to alliterative play in today’s Zippy:

In the last round, it was all /p/. This time, it’s /f/, /t/, /s/, and back to /f/.

Fairchild Semiconductor is of course a real company (based in San Jose CA). Selwyn Selfseeker’s name might be an allusion to two long poems, Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Robert Frost’s The Self-Seeker (from North of Boston, 1915).

 

soft/hard

(Only a bit about language. High sexuality content.)

I’ve posted earlier, on AZBlogX, about pairings of photos of men clothed vs. unclothed: contrasts that provoke thought about clothing and the body (and about the way people hold themselves when they are clothed vs. when they are naked). I’ve also posted, several times, on penis size, most recently here (with a follow-up here); the first of these includes factual material about penis size, along with comments on the size obsession of gay male porn (and the second has comments about the vocabulary of penis size).

Now, thanks to a link by Jodie Lane on Facebook, another set of contrasts, on the site Flaccid – Erect Gallery, which pairs photos of soft and hard dicks:

Zippialliterate

Initial /p/ is everywhere in Dingburg today:

Alliteration in modern English serves mostly playful purposes — in tongue twisters (“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”), brand names (PayPal), formulaic expressions (pleased as punch), and the like. It was a standard poetic device in Old English, and is the basis for the occasional alliterative poems written today.

A related phenomenon is the use of stuttering in music, as in the Papageno/Papagena duet from the Magic Flute (“Pa pa pa …”). There’s an on-line collection of stuttering songs, of many different types, here.

 

Language play log

Three items with language play in them that came by me recently, in the order of their appearance: (1) the Mental Floss list of their ten best-selling t-shirts; (2) an Ian Shoales piece rushing through “The Catchphrase History of the World”; and (3) some porn flick titles.

Ducks

Back from Stanford Hospital since Saturday morning. Things move very slowly on weekends. so nothing much has happened. I sleep most of the day, attended by Ned and Elizabeth. Not yet able to move around much, nor have I mastered the intricacies of the walker, which are considerable, and the effects of the pain medication (lots of oxy), which are complex, sometimes overwhelming.

But on more pleasant fronts, there’s the PBS Nature show I saw on tv (on Friday? my time perceptions are unsteady indeed), about ducks. A “duckumentary”; I suppose that was inevitable. Full of wonderful shots of ducks of many kinds — alone, in families, in flocks.

We were taught that every species of duck is either a dabbler duck or a diver duck. Or, as Gilbert & Sullivan would have it:

Every duck and every drake
Is either a little dabbler
Or else a little diver.

Hey, I’m coming back to life very very gradually.

Tongue twisters

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:

The old tongue twister is in fact better — because it’s more likely to trip you up.