How ’bout them Cubbies?

Today’s Zippy:

So the strip is “about” hair(s), but it’s also “about” How ’bout them Cubbies?

(On a personal hair and holiday note: I’m watching Hairspray for Mothers Day.)

penultimate

An Emily Flake cartoon in the May 6th New Yorker:

Word play exploiting an ambiguity in ultimate.

Nick Danger: an appreciation

My iTunes woke me this morning with “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye” (from Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All (1969)). It’s packed full of playfulness, silliness, and absurdity, much of it linguistic.

End of The Empire

From the Palo Alto Daily News  a little while ago: “End of an Empire: Downtown Palo Alto pub closing its doors after 21-year run” by Jason Green:

For two decades, the Empire Tap Room [aka the Empire Tap and Grill] has injected a bit of East Coast flavor into downtown Palo Alto.

It’s been a favorite of movers and shakers like Congresswoman Anna Eshoo [whose office is across the street], San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator Vic Fangio and Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen.

But on April 28, an empire will end, so to speak, when long-time proprietress Josie Jelks closes the doors forever.

Jelks said she made the decision with a heavy heart. Costs have increased prohibitively across the board, from rent to liability insurance to the supplies necessary to run the pub at 651 Emerson St.

April 28th is today, and the Empire is essentially out my back door — a very pleasant place, with a wonderful long bar and a fabulous patio / courtyard, and inventive simple food. It will be much missed.

Brief mention: a portmant

A portmant is a clipped portmanteau. There aren’t all that many of them, but here’s one that came to my attention today. It starts with the portmanteau zoobiquity, a somewhat over-clever (and opaque, but certainly memorable) combination of zoo + ubiquity. And goes on to zoob.

Penguins and tuxedos

Today’s Bizarro plays on the association between penguins and tuxedos — with penguins in t-shirts and open-necked shirts instead of tuxedos:

  (#1)

There are other cartoons about penguins and tuxedos (and other cartoons about Casual Fridays, though I won’t look at them here); in fact, there are vast numbers of cartoons about penguins, which are easily anthropomorphized (they walk, or waddle, on two legs, and have arm-like, flipper-like wings) and are fascinatingly anomalous creatures (flightless birds that feed underwater and live in extreme climates and terrain). They are also gregarious and gather in large numbers, leading to cartoons about the difficulty of telling one penguin from another.

Now some words about actual penguins, and how some of them can easily be seen as wearing tuxedos, leading to altered photos of penguins *in* tuxedos and penguins as the emblems of tuexo rental stores; about tuxedos; and about Casual Fridays. Then a selection of penguin cartoons that haven’t already appeared on this blog.

pinnies

In my e-mail a little while ago, a Princeton University Store ad offering Princeton pinnies — one illustrated here:

The text:

The weather is finally starting to warm up and we have the perfect lightweight summer staple for Tigers everywhere – the Princeton pinnie! With a nice loose fit and 2-ply mesh these are sure to keep you cool in all senses of the word! Did we mention, they’re all REVERSIBLE and available in several different styles?!

The term pinnie for such a garment was new to me. But it’s been around for a while, though primarily in British usage.

husband

On Thursday Max Vasilalatos and I fell into a discussion of how we manage to sleep sitting up when health considerations require it. I have a wedge I can use in my bed, and for many months I slept sitting up in a reclining chair. Max volunteered that she had a husband for this purpose, but it wasn’t entirely satisfactory. I was puzzled until she described the object — not a human being — that she used for this purpose. The Wikipedia account (in the pillow entry):

A husband pillow (also known as a boyfriend pillow) is a large, high-backed pillow with two “arms”. It is used to prop the user upright while in bed or on the floor, as for reading or watching television.

A picture:

Truncated what the fuck

In a Details (April 2013) interview of Matthew McConaughey (by Adam Sachs), this unlikely passage describing McConaughey’s interaction with a red songbird in New Orleans:

They’re staring at each other now. Then a flash of rencognition seems to pass across the songbird’s glassy features and he chirps out an excitable tune that, to my untrained ears, translates roughly as:

It’s him! Mr. all right all right j.k. livin himself! The bongo-banging, chisel-chested playboy philosopher king inexplicaby here among the vines and branches of my garden paradise on the grounds of this crumbling old Treme mansion! The fuck is he doing here?

The fuck, indeed.

That’s the fuck standing for what the fuck.

Context, jargon, and clipping

From an article in Details magazine for April 2013, p. 64, a quote given here without context:

“The house doesn’t even have a complete back. We had to be careful about the budget and determined that we could add the top of the roof in post.”

Add … in post is baffling without the context. Things get a bit clearer when I tell you that the house in question is the ominous Victorian house next to the motel on the set of the new A&E tv series Bates Motel (a prequel to the movie Psycho), and the speaker is Mark Freeborn, the production designer for the series. But that gets you only part of the way; you also have to work out that post is a clipping of post-production in the jargon of filmmaking and video production. And of course you need to know what post-production refers to as a technical term in this world.