(Not much on language, but entertaining nonetheless.)

What unites SoCal teens, shirtless dancers, and fighters of flying sharks? Take a moment to think.

Ian Ziering, that’s what.

(#1)

Yesterday I chanced to come upon the tv-movie Sharknado (one of the great horde of portmanteau-named monster movies, many involving sharks)  — Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! was released a few days ago, so cable tv was showing the previous two installments — and eventually realized that the familiar-looking male lead was in fact Ian Ziering, of Beverly Hills 90210 fame, and more recently (it turns out) of Chippendales dancing renown. Not the standard arc of an acting career, but it seems to be working for Ziering; the Sharknado films, in particular, have been enormously successful.

From Wikipedia:

Ian Andrew Ziering (… born March 30, 1964) is an American actor and voice actor best known for his role as Steve Sanders on the television series Beverly Hills, 90210, which he played from 1990 to 2000. He is also the voice of Vinnie on Biker Mice from Mars. More recently, he has played “Fin” in the Sharknado film series.

The male leads on 90210: Ian Ziering, Luke Perry, Jason Priestley:

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Ziering then got work in various tv and movie gigs; recently he snagged two major jobs — the Sharknado films and Chippendales dancing.

From Wikipedia on the first of the shark films:

Sharknado is a 2013 made-for-television disaster film about a waterspout that lifts sharks out of the ocean and deposits them in Los Angeles.

With Ziering as Finley “Fin” Shepard, an ex-surfer who owns a bar.

The second film (set in NYC) followed in 2014, and the third (set in Washington D.C., then moving down the Eastern Seaboard to Florida) was released on July 22nd of this year. Ziering in #2:

(#3)

Meanwhile, Chippendales. From Wikipedia:

Chippendales is a touring dance troupe best known for its male striptease performances and for its dancers’ distinctive upper body costume of a bow tie and shirt cuffs worn on an otherwise bare torso.

Established in 1979, Chippendales was the first all-male stripping troupe to make a business performing for mostly female audiences. Through the quality of its staging and choreography, Chippendales also helped legitimize stripping as a form of popular entertainment. Today, the company produces Broadway-style shows worldwide and licenses its intellectual property for select consumer products ranging from apparel and accessories to slot machines and video games. The Chippendales perform in a ten-million dollar theater and lounge built specifically for them at the Rio All Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

From the Just Jared site on 6/16/14, “Ian Ziering Goes Shirtless at 50 for Chippendales Return!”:

Ian Ziering goes shirtless and flexes his big muscles while posing on the red carpet for his big return as the Chippendales guest host on Saturday (June 14) at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

The 50-year-old Sharknado star will be starring in the show for a limited six week engagement. He previously appeared in the production last summer.

(#4)

Ziering on these performances (from Just Jared):

“You have got to take care of yourself as you age. That’s a given. You have the body you deserve. If you treat it well, take care of yourself and focus on health and fitness, you will be equipped to adapt to change and to capitalize on opportunity,” Ian recently said. “When I started thinking that way, that revelation just opened up the world for me. Being 50 is great. It’s none of the things I thought it would be when I looked at it through 20-year-old eyes.”

Today’s Bizarro, with yet another King Kong cartoon (it’s a cartoon meme):

The movie King Kong has a firm place in American popular culture: the giant gorilla has appeared as a character in a long series of movies and tv shows after the 1933 original film.

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Don Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

xx

Today’s Zippy, with two sets of names to savor:

(#1)

First, there are the preposterous Dingburger names: Flexo Sodafiber, Glassine Bookpaper, Flemish Spindleplunger. Then there are the products, their mascots, and their names. Commerce and pop culture.

Snap-E-Tom. From a BrandlandUSA column by Garland Pollard on 1/28/10, “Where is Ortega’s Snap E Tom?”

He was the hot tomato of the 1970s brunch, Snap E Tom. But when did this tomato juice mascot disappear from grocery shelves?

Snap E was a product of the Pioneer Ortega Chili Company, and later Heublein, from what I can find. Made with chile peppers, onions and tomatoes, it was a Bloody Mary mix that advertised itself as Bloody Thomas.

According to Kathy Strong’s Southern California Off the Beaten Path, Ortega of Ventura, California was founded by Emilio Ortega. Ortega was headquartered in the historic Ortega Adobe, a structure at 215 East Main Street. Ortega invented a fire roasting process for chili peppers and developed chili, salsa and Snap-E-Tom.

(#2)

It turns out that it’s still made and is widely available (you can order it through Amazon); but it’s now made by DelMonte.

The Quik Bunny. From Wikipedia:

Nesquik is a brand of products made by Nestlé. In 1948, Nestlé launched a mix for chocolate-flavored milk called Nestle Quik. This was released in Europe during the 1950s as Nesquik… the name was changed to the worldwide brand Nesquik in 1999.

A cartoon Quik Bunny first appeared on the cans of the strawberry flavor when it was introduced. Later, an anthropomorphic animated bunny wearing a large red “Q” on a collar-like necklace, was introduced in television commercials as the new chocolate Quik mascot. He debuted in 1973.

(#3)

Little Lulu for Kleenex. Discussion of the Little Lulu comic in this 7/25/13 posting of mine. Now the Kleenex connection, from the Wikipedia page:

The character was widely merchandised, and was the first mascot for Kleenex tissues; from 1952 to 1965 the character appeared in an elaborate animated billboard in Times Square in New York City.

… Little Lulu was featured on numerous licensed products, and she was the centerpiece of an extensive advertising campaign for Kleenex tissues during the 1940s–50s… Kleenex commercials featuring Little Lulu were regularly seen in the 1950s on Perry Como’s television show.

From 1948:

(#4)

An entertaining piece in the NYT on the 4th (in the print edition that I get): “Iran Capitalizing on a Taste for America’s Biggest Brands” by Thomas Erdbrink:

Tehran— Despite the smiling clown, a symbol of the Great Satan’s love for meat, buns and fries, there were no angry mobs punching fists in the air, shouting “Death to America”; nor did the smell of burned American flags permeate this Tehran neighborhood.

It smelled of juicy burgers, flipped by a cheerful Iranian teenager named Jahan. His kitchen was crowned with a flashing logo that looked remarkably similar to the golden arches of McDonald’s, perhaps the best-known symbol of American fast-food imperialism.

The global chain’s other well-known trademark, the white-faced, ever-smiling clown with a red jacket, yellow pants and red oversize shoes, was also present on a large poster waving to lure customers.

No, McDonald’s has not opened in Tehran only weeks after a nuclear deal was reached that will ease international sanctions and possibly portend a change in Iranian revolutionary attitudes toward American companies.

This is Mash Donald’s, Iran’s homegrown version.

“We are trying to get as close as we can get to the McDonald’s experience,” said the owner, Hassan, who did not want his family name published out of fear of Iranian hard-liners and American trademark lawyers.  [not an easy spot to be in]

… Mash Donald’s and other knockoffs of American food culture are increasingly dominating the streets of major Iranian cities, symbols of the increasing disruption to the official revolutionary anti-American narrative that has more or less predominated since the 1979 overthrow of the shah and the siege of the American Embassy.

… No genuine American food chain has an outlet in Iran, mainly because of the government’s hostility and the sanctions that make such businesses impossible. Instead, American fast-food replicas have proliferated, with quirky changes in the names to give the owners some plausible deniability.

Besides Mash Donald’s, Tehran has a K.F.C. (Kabooki Fried Chicken) a Pizza Hut (Pizza Hat) and a Burger King (Burger House).

… On a Photoshopped poster outside showing a McDonald’s truck, an advertisement beckons: “Try our Mash Donald’s 1.5 foot long super sandwich.” Another poster reads: “Mash Donald’s Falafel sandwich!”? The falafel sandwich costs $2.10, the 1.5-foot-long sandwich about $3.75. [American McDonald’s could use a falafel sandwich]

Inside, Jahan and a co-worker, Karim, stood for hours amid the smell of old frying oil, making the Mash Donald’s version of the Big Mac.

Instead of calling it the Big Mash, however, the owner chose “Mash Donald’s baguette burger,” a hefty mix of meat, cheese and turkey ham (cost: about $3).

Interesting that a central part of the craze is for the visual trappings of American popular culture, with the food adapted for local tastes

Today’s Zippy takes us lots of places:

(#1)

It shows our Pinhead talking French Impressionism with a roadside ice cream stand that happens to be a fiberglass replica of an ice cream cone. (In Zippy, roadside fiberglass artifacts are almost always chatty.)  Degas (gauzy ballerinas), Monet (soft-focus water lilies), but especially Gustave Caillebotte: men scraping floors and flying, drying, laundry.

Where to start? I’ll go with the building.

Twistee Treats. From Roadside Architecture:

Twistee Treat buildings are 28 feet tall and 20 feet wide fiberglass ice cream cones topped with cherries. [Note that Bill Griffith has chosen to have this one topped with chocolate rather than a cherry, and has removed any signage.] The design was created by Robert G. “Skip” Skinner who built the first location in North Fort Myers in 1982. The buildings were produced in Cape Coral, FL. They were made from 19 pieces of fiberglass and assembled on-site. By 1986, there were 30 locations, all of them in Florida. It is believed that about 90 of these buildings were produced over the years. About half of them have been demolished.

In 1990, the company filed for bankruptcy. A new company was formed in 1996. In 1999, this new Twistee Treat Corporation still managed 35 locations in Florida and Missouri and planned to expand to Georgia and Texas. These new locations were to offer gourmet coffee, burgers, and other food. The interiors were to feature swivel stools, white fiberglass counters, and a white and magenta color scheme. However, I don’t believe any of these new buildings were ever built. The company ceased to exist around 2000. Before becoming defunct, Twistee Treat sold the franchising rights to a company in Canada. Using the name of Twirlees, the company produced similar, smaller mobile units and trucks. There were several of these units in Florida. There was one of these units at the Twistee Treat in Ocala, FL which was moved to West Chester, OH …

In 2010, an Orlando-based company was established to revive the Twistee Treat chain. In 2011, Twistee Treat USA opened a location in Orlando, FL. The company now has 13 locations in Florida: Kissimmee (3), Tampa (3), Orlando (2), Davenport, Spring Hill, Sebring, Tarpon Springs, and Sheldon.

Despite the close connection to Florida, the building in #1 is almost surely the one in Perry MI, which has been there since 2006 and goes by the name of King Kone. View from the back:

(#2)

It has a Facebook page.

Digression: the name King Kone and the category FASTFOOD. An obvious play on King Kong, suggesting that the cones at this place are gigantic.

There are a huge number of ice cream stands and trucks using the name King Kone, most of which seem to have nothing to do with the others; it’s a play on words that seems to have occurred independently to many people. Here’s a cute one in Somers NY (in northeastern Westchester County):

(#3)

You’ll see from the signs that the place offers more than ice cream. In fact, it sells a variety of food: buffalo wings, fried shrimp, fried clam strips, burgers, hot dogs, grilled chicken breasts, lobster rolls, chicken nuggets and fingers, corn dogs, BLT sandwiches, fries of several types, cole slaw, and more — an assemblage of things that constitute a cultural category (in the U.S., at least), but one that has no standard name. Since it’s a category of things conventionally offered in fast-food restaurants (we can argue about the lobster rolls, but then category boundaries are rarely crisp), I’ll use the category label FASTFOOD.

On to Caillebotte. The artist has come up on this blog only once before, as far as I can see: in a 9/29/11 posting on the eccentric artist Vik Muniz, where I quoted a New Yorker piece on him:

[Muniz’s pictures] are collaged from torn scraps of magazines that are greatly enlarged in the massive, grainy final product, an art-historical image that comes together only when you see the work from a distance. The accumulation of brushstrokes in paintings by Degas, Caillebotte, Cézanne, and Caspar David Friedrich is suggested by the rough edges of bits of paper, but the content of those bits (Kate Moss, Woody Allen, a body builder, the Chanel logo) suggests the irresistible tug of pop culture

Now, from Wikipedia:

Gustave Caillebotte (… 19 August 1848 – 21 February 1894) was a French painter, member and patron of the group of artists known as Impressionists, though he painted in a much more realistic manner than many other artists in the group. Caillebotte was noted for his early interest in photography as an art form.

He painted scenes of upper-class Parisian life, — for instance, Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877, more on which below, and portraits of his family and friends — but also of working-class life (that drying laundry and those men scraping floors, and also gardeners at work). He retired young from painting, then became important as a collector and a patron of artists.

… His art was largely forgotten until the 1950s when his descendents began to sell the family collection. In 1964, The Art Institute of Chicago acquired Paris Street; Rainy Day, spurring American interest in the artist.

That famous painting:

(#4)

Caillebotte did at least two paintings of laundry drying — the one below (Laundry Drying, Petit Gennevilliers, 1892) and Laundry Drying on the Banks of the Seine, ca. 1892.

(#5)

Then the scrapers, or planers:

(#6)

From Wikipedia, with a substantial essay on the painting and its history:

Les raboteurs de parquet (English title: The Floor Scrapers) is an oil painting by French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte. The canvas measures 102 by 146.5 centimetres (40.2 in × 57.7 in). It was originally given by Caillebotte’s family in 1894 to the Musée du Luxembourg, then transferred to the Musée du Louvre in 1929. In 1947, it was moved to the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, and in 1986, it was transferred again to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it is currently displayed.

Caillebotte’s originality laid in his attempt to combine the careful drawing, modeling and exact tonal values encouraged by the Académie with vivid colors, bold perspectives, keen sense of natural light and modern subject matter of the Impressionist movement. Painted in 1875, this work illustrates Caillebotte’s continued interest in perspective and everyday life. In the scene, the observer stands above three workers on hands and knees, scraping a wooden floor in a bourgeois apartment—now believed to be Caillebotte’s own studio at 77, rue de Miromesnil, in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. A window on the back wall admits natural light. The workers are all shown with nude torsos and tilted heads, suggesting a conversation. Caillebotte’s interest in the male nude [plus the fact that he never married], set in a modern context, has been linked to his presumed homosexuality. It must be noted, however, that it was part of a larger trend, not necessarily limited to homosexual artists, that was first introduced by Courbet in a painting of two wrestlers (Szépmüvézeti Museum, Budapest). This is one of the first paintings to feature the urban working class. It reintroduces the subject of the male nude in the painting, but in a strikingly updated form. Instead of the heroes of antiquity, here are the heroes of modern life — sinewy and strong — in stooped poses that would appear demeaning if they did not convey a sense of masculine strength and honest labor. There is a motif of curls in the image, from the wood shavings on the floor, to the pattern of ironwork in the window grill to the arched backs and arms of the workers. The repetition in the image, with the three workers engaged in different aspects of the same activity but having similar poses, is similar to works by Caillebotte’s contemporary, Edgar Degas.

Despite the effort Caillebotte put into the painting, it was rejected by France’s most prestigious art exhibition, the Salon, in 1875. The depiction of working-class people in their trade, not fully clothed, shocked the jurors and was deemed a “vulgar subject matter”.

Oh my, oh my. Shudders from the Salon.

(Preparing this posting led me through a great many of Caillebotte’s paintings, which show great variety in style and subject matter — there are also fine still-lifes of food, and Impressionist flower and garden paintings. A very satisfying art tour.)

As usual, I have no idea why the name was in my head when I woke up, though it is Huncke’s centennial year:

(#1)

Yes, a celebration of the archetypical outsider and outlaw. But now there’s a blog devoted to him, here.

Some highlights, from Wikipedia:

Herbert Edwin Huncke (January 9, 1915 – August 8, 1996) was a writer and poet, and active participant in a number of emerging cultural, social and aesthetic movements of the 20th century in America. He was a member of the Beat Generation and is reputed to have coined the term.

Born in Greenfield, Massachusetts and reared in Chicago, Herbert Huncke was a street hustler, high school dropout and drug user. Huncke’s life was centered around living as a hobo, jumping trains across the vast expanse of the United States, bonding through a shared destitution and camaraderie with other vagrants…

[Starting in 1939], Huncke’s regular haunts were 42nd Street and Times Square, where he associated with a variety of people, including prostitutes (both male and female) and sailors.

… During the late 1940s, Huncke was recruited to be a subject in Alfred Kinsey’s research on the sexual habits of the American male. He was interviewed by Kinsey, and recruited fellow addicts and friends to participate. Huncke had been a writer, unpublished, since his days in Chicago and gravitated toward literary types and musicians. In the music world, Huncke visited all the jazz clubs and associated with Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon (with whom he was once busted on 42nd Street for breaking into a parked car). When he first met Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, they were interested in writing and also unpublished. They were inspired by his stories of 42nd Street life, criminal life, street slang and his vast experience with drugs. Huncke was immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road” as the character Elmer Hassel.

Although it was his passion for thievery, heroin use and the outlaw lifestyle [that] fueled his daily activities, when he was caught he refused to inform on his friends.

Huncke and Ginsberg on E. 10th St. in NYC, 1970:

(#2)

In the local real estate news (from NBC Bay Area yesterday), “‘Flintstones’ House in Hillsborough Listed for $4.2M” by Tamara Palmer and Ian Cull:

Hillsborough’s most recognizable piece of real estate has hit the market.

The home at 45 Berryessa Way, though relatively small by the town’s standards at 2,730 square feet, is seeking a big price tag of $4.2 million

(#1)

A story that will take us through several twists and turns of pop culture.

From Wikipedia:

The Flintstone House is a free-form, single-family residence in Hillsborough, California [not far south of San Francisco] overlooking, and best seen from the Eugene A. Doran Memorial Bridge on Interstate 280. It was designed by architect William Nicholson and built in 1976 as an experiment in new building materials, in the form of a series of domes. It was constructed by spraying shotcrete onto steel rebar and wire mesh frames over inflated balloons. Originally off-white in color, it was repainted a deep orange in the early 2000s. The house contains three bedrooms and two bathrooms.

Known popularly as “The Flintstone House”, it derives its name from The Flintstones, a Hanna-Barbera Productions animated cartoon series of the early 1960s about a Stone Age family.

The home is also known as “The Barbapapa House,” deriving its name from “Barbapapa”, a character and series of books created by “Annette Tison” and “Talus Taylor” in the 1970s.

Now to the Flintstones and Barbapapa, with a digression on Dick Clark, and then on to Shmoos.

(#2)

The original Flintstone House

From Wikipedia:

The Flintstones is an animated, prime-time American television sitcom that was broadcast from September 30, 1960 to April 1, 1966, on ABC. The show, produced by Hanna-Barbera, fancifully depicted the lives of a working-class Stone Age man, his family, and his next-door neighbor and best friend.

The show’s continuing popularity rested heavily on its juxtaposition of modern everyday concerns in the Stone Age setting.

The show is set in the Stone Age town of Bedrock. In this fantasy version of the past, dinosaurs and other long-extinct animals co-exist with cavemen, saber-toothed cats, and woolly mammoths. Like their mid-twentieth century counterparts, these cavemen listen to records, live in split-level homes, and eat out at restaurants, yet their technology is made entirely from pre-industrial materials and largely powered through the use of animals. For example, the cars are made out of stone, wood and animal skins, and powered by the passengers’ feet.

– Fred Flintstone is the main character of the series. Fred is an accident-prone bronto-crane operator at the Slate Rock and Gravel Company and the head of the Flintstone clan.

– Wilma Flintstone is Fred’s wife. She is more intelligent and level-headed than her husband, though she often has a habit of spending money

– Pebbles Flintstone is the Flintstones’ infant daughter, who is born near the end of the third season.

– Dino, a prosauropod dinosaur, is the Flintstones’ pet who barks and generally acts like a dog.

– Barney Rubble is the secondary main character and Fred’s best friend and next door neighbor.

– Betty Rubble is Barney’s wife and Wilma’s best friend.

– Bamm-Bamm Rubble is the Rubbles’ abnormally strong adopted son, whom they adopt during the fourth season

– Hoppy is the Rubbles’ pet Hopparoo (a kangaroo/dinosaur combination creature), whom they adopt in the beginning of the fifth season.

The main cast (Hoppy, Wilma, Pebbles, Fred, Bamm-Bamm, Barney, Dino, Betty:

(#3)

(All very symmetrical: two married couples, each with one child and one extraordinary pet. The men are best friends and the women are best friends. The kids are of opposite sexes, the pets are of different species. Everybody’s hair is color-coded and contrasted: the spouses have different hair colors, the best friends have different hair colors, and the kids have different hair colors. Fred and Wilma are strongly contrasted in temperament, as are Fred and Barney.)

The opening for the show:

(I haven’t posted systematically on the show before now, though I have posted on The Jetsons, which premiered in 1962 as Hanna-Barbera’s Space Age counterpart to The Flintstones.)

[The Dick Clark digression. The Hillsborough house (from 1976) was the first, but radio and tv personality Dick Clark came along in 1988 to have another, much more stylish, Flintstone House built for him on top of a hill in Malibu (in southern California):

(#4)

Clark put this house on the market in March 2012 (a month before he died), with an asking price of $3.5 million (stories in many places at the time, for instance in the Daily Mail, here); it has huge glass windows in every room, giving amazing views of the nearby Pacific Ocean, Channel Islands, Boney Mountains and Serrano Valley. After it was on the market for nearly three years, Clark’s widow finally sold the house in 2014, for $1.778 million (again stories in many places at the time, for instance in Curbed LA, here, with lots of photos).]

Barbapapa.From Wikipedia:

Barbapapa is both the title character, and name of the “species” of said character, of a series of children’s books written in the 1970s by Annette Tison and Talus Taylor, who resided in Paris, France. The books were originally written in French (barbe à papa – literally “Daddy’s beard” – is French for cotton candy or candy floss), and were later translated into over 30 languages.

… The main characters in the books are the Barbapapa family, who are most notable for their ability to shapeshift at will. In their native form, Barbapapas are blob-shaped, with a distinct head and arms, but no legs. Male Barbapapas have rounder bottoms, whereas female Barbapapas have a more slender form. Each Barbapapa can adopt any form they choose, but they remain easily identifiable by always retaining their faces and their distinctive colour.

Barbapapa himself is a generally papaya-shaped, pink shapeshifting blob-like creature who stumbles upon the human world and tries to fit in.

… After various adventures, Barbapapa comes across a female of his species (more shapely, and black-coloured), named Barbamama. They produce four sons: Barbidur, a sports fan (red), Barbibul, a scientist (blue), Barbidou, a nature enthusiast (yellow) and Barbouille, a painter (black and furry), as well as three daughters: Barbalala, a musician (green), Barbabelle, a beauty queen (purple) and Barbotine, an intellectual (orange).

The family:

(#5)

And the original Barbapapa House, in cross-section, from Barbapapa’s New House (1978):

(#6)

In the book, Papa becomes the mold for the Barbaplastic the Barbapapas use to create a new house for the family. The delights of shapeshifting.

Shmoo. Americans coming across Barbapapa (and the Barbapapas) are likely to think of him as cousin to Shmoo (and the shmoos) — a creation of cartoonist Al Capp (previous posting on Capp here) in a vein of utopian satire.

(#7)

From Wikipedia:

The shmoo (plural: shmoon, also shmoos) is a fictional cartoon creature created by Al Capp (1909–79); it first appeared in his classic comic strip Li’l Abner on August 31, 1948.

A shmoo is shaped like a plump bowling pin with stubby legs. It has smooth skin, eyebrows and sparse whiskers — but no arms, nose or ears. Its feet are short and round but dextrous, as the shmoo’s comic book adventures make clear. It has a rich gamut of facial expressions and often expresses love by exuding hearts over its head. Cartoonist Al Capp ascribed to the shmoo the following curious characteristics. His satirical intent should be evident:

• They reproduce asexually and are incredibly prolific, multiplying exponentially faster than rabbits. They require no sustenance other than air.
• Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself — either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or into a broiling pan, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. (Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.)
• They also produce eggs (neatly packaged), milk (bottled, grade-A), and butter—no churning required. Their pelts make perfect bootleather or house timber, depending on how thick you slice it.
• They have no bones, so there’s absolutely no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.
• Naturally gentle, they require minimal care, and are ideal playmates for young children. The frolicking of shmoon is so entertaining (such as their staged “shmoosical comedies”) that people no longer feel the need to watch television or go to the movies.
• Some of the more tasty varieties of shmoo are more difficult to catch. Usually shmoo hunters, [shmoo hunting is] now a sport in some parts of the country, utilize a paper bag, flashlight and stick to capture their shmoos. At night the light stuns them, then they can be whacked in the head with the stick and put in the bag for frying up later on.

Two extraordinary houses (NoCal and SoCal), a link to Dick Clark, an animated cartoon on tv, a series of illustrated children’s books, and a fabulous creature from the comic strips.

For some time, Mike Pope has been (gently) after me on Facebook to assemble a list of linguistic terms that are my innovations. This turns out to be a devilishly difficult enterprise, for several reasons, a prime one being something that afflicts any attempt to discover the “inventor” of an expression: as I’ve noted several times on this blog, most innovations exploit potentials in the language that are in principle available to everyone (various figures of speech, semantic extensions and specializations, patterns of word formation, and so on), so that it’s quite likely that an innovation has been made by many people on many different occasions, without anyone taking special notice or recording these events.

But sometimes one of these events is noticed, at least within a particular sociocultural community, and that’s taken to be a founding event (with an identifiable source), from which the innovation can spread within the community; the innovator is then given credit within the community.

And so to the story of metaphorical zombie.

The figure of the zombie — in popular culture, an undead creature, typically depicted as a mindless, reanimated human corpse with a hunger for human flesh (to paraphrase Wikipedia) — serves as the basis for several metaphorical developments of the word zombie: in the informal term zombie ‘a person who is or appears lifeless, apathetic, or completely unresponsive to their surroundings’; in uses that turn crucially on a zombie’s relentless refusal to finally and fully die, no matter what you might do to it (call this the undead theme); and in uses that turn crucially on a zombie’s lack of a mind (it has no thoughts, only appetites), so that it is vulnerable to being taken over and externally controlled (call this the mindless theme).

Consider some uses from Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for zombie, and start with the mindless theme. A use from computing:

Zombie …, a computer compromised by a hacker and used to perform malicious tasks

And then in the animal world, uses for pathogens or parasites that take over a creature and control its behavior, producing zombie ants, zombie spiders, zombie rats, etc. Consider, for example, an 8/6/15 feature story, “Zombie spiders enslaved by manipulative wasp masters”, beginning:

Beware the wasps that turn unsuspecting spiders into workaholic zombies.

Japanese researchers have found that a wasp which lays its egg on the back of a spider can take control of its behaviour, making its spider slave build a cosy cocoon for its wasp offspring.

On to the undead theme. Two uses from computing:

Zombie object, in garbage-collected object-oriented programming languages, an object that has been finalized but then resurrected

Zombie process, on Unix-like OS, a process that has completed execution but still has an entry in the process table

And one from finance:

Zombie bank, a financial institution with an economic net worth less than zero that continues to operate because of implicit or explicit government support

Still on the undead theme, turn now to linguistics and my 5/22/05 LLog posting, “Five more thoughts on the That Rule”, where I wrote:

In the process of dissemination, the That Rule has made its way into textbooks and manuals for writers.  Once there, the prescription might well go on forever as a “zombie rule”; no matter how many times, and how thoroughly, it is executed by authorities (like Quirk, Biber, Huddleston & Pullum, or, for that matter, me), it continues its wretched life-in-death in style sheets and grammar checkers and the like.

The metaphor is entirely natural, and might well have been used many times by linguists in lectures, conversations, and so on, but my 2005 use of itis the one that caught on, thanks to my LLog colleagues Geoff Pullum and Mark Liberman.

In a 2006 talk, Geoff distinguished (true) zombie rules, which have a history of being maintained over some time (despite appeals by critics to actual usage), and bogeymen, “rules” invented on some occasion, but without even a history of bad usage advice. In a posting on this blog, I recognized the distinction between natural zombies and constructed zombies, but argued that such a distinction in the history of usage advice shouldn’t have any significance for ordinary users, maintaining that “they both are species of invalid advice” and can be lumped together as zombie rules.

Next up was Mark, in a 2008 LLog posting, “When zombie rules attack”, where he discussed the “split verb” proscription (no adverb between auxiliary and main verb) and credited me with the term zombie rule — and others picked up the attribution from Mark.

Things moved on from there. In two zombie postings in 2009, one on blame, love, and graduate (here) and one on convince (here), I reported on Mark’s and my wrangling with a series of zombies. By then the term zombie rule was standard, at least in one small corner of linguistics.

I woke to the sound of the famous theme from Schubert’s incidental music for the play Rosamunde, a tune to which a friend had been taught a rhyme in grade school that was supposed to help kids fix the theme and its creator in their minds:

Franz Peter Schubert,
Kind and gentle spirit,
Wrote with his quill pen
Melodies like these.

A performance (rather slow for my taste) by the Neue Orchestra under Christoph Spering:

This little melody will take us far afield, eventually to the “Beer Barrel Polka” and the brewpubs of San Francisco.

Musical mnemonics. Every so often, people decide to provide words for themes from classical music, for the education and entertainment of children. And now there’s the group Beethoven’s Wig. From Wikipedia:

Beethoven’s Wig is a vocal group that sings lyrics written to the greatest hits of classical music. Created by lyricist, lead singer and producer Richard Perlmutter, the group has been a featured performer with numerous symphony orchestras. Beethoven’s Wig has recorded four albums.

Their first album, from 2002:

(#1)

“Beethoven’s Wig” is a setting of the beginning of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, beginning “Beethoven’s Wig / Is very big” (the short-short-short-long motif).

The play Rosamunde. From Wikipedia:

Rosamunde, Fürstin von Zypern (Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus) is a play by Helmina von Chézy, which is primarily remembered for the incidental music which Franz Schubert composed for it. Music and play premiered in Vienna’s Theater an der Wien on 20 December 1823.

The incidental music is D. 797 (Op. 26) — 797 in Otto Erich Deutsch’s catalogue of Schubert’s works, with an opus number provided by the original publisher — and the relevant section is

#5. Entr’acte No. 3 in B♭ major (Andantino) … one of the two best-known pieces in the score. The main theme was used again in the Impromptu [for piano] in B♭, Op. 142 (D. 935), No. 3. Schubert used an almost identical theme in the second movement of his String Quartet in A minor, D 804.

Here’s a performance of the “Rosamunde Variations” impromptu by Yeol Eum Son (from the Van Cliburn competition in 2009):

The German song “Rosamunde”. Another occurrence of the woman’s name, in a song we know in English as “The Beer Barrel Polka”. It has a complex history. From Wikipedia:

Beer Barrel Polka, also known as The Barrel Polka and Roll Out the Barrel, is a song which became popular worldwide during World War II. The music was composed by the Czech musician Jaromír Vejvoda in 1927. Eduard Ingriš wrote the first arrangement of the piece, after Vejvoda came upon the melody and sought Ingriš’s help in refining it. At that time, it was played without lyrics as Modřanská polka (“Polka of Modřany”). Its first text was written later (in 1934) by Václav Zeman – with the title Škoda lásky (“Wasted Love”).

The polka became famous around the world. In June 1939, “Beer Barrel Polka”, as recorded by Will Glahé, was #1 on the Hit Parade. This version was distributed by Shapiro Bernstein. Glahé’s earlier 1934 recording sold many copies in its German version Rosamunde (it is possible the reason for the rapid spread was due to the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany, and subsequent emigration of thousands of Czechs to other parts of the world, bringing this catchy tune with them). The authors of the English lyrics were Lew Brown and Wladimir Timm. Meanwhile, the song was recorded and played by many others such as Andrews Sisters in 1939, Glenn Miller Orchestra, Benny Goodman, Bobby Vinton, Billie Holiday, and Joe Patek. who sold over a million copies of his album “Beer Barrel Polka.”

[… two of many notes from popular culture:] The song became a signature song of well-known entertainer Liberace.

Since the 1970s, it (usually the Frankie Yankovic version) has been played during the seventh inning stretch at Milwaukee Brewers baseball games, as well as becoming one of the state of Wisconsin’s unofficial state songs as it is also played at numerous University of Wisconsin sporting events, as well as Green Bay Packers home games, and Milwaukee Panthers basketball games, including after every home win.

Ok, some German versions. First, “Rosamunde”, sung by soprano Nadja Golowtschuk (with wonderful flower photos as backdrop):

And then  a beefier version of “Rosamunde” from André Rieu and the Johann Strauss Orchestra, with baritone Heino singing:

On to English versions, where there oh so many to pick from. But I think my favorite is the early Andrews Sisters:

(#2)

(I have a fondness for girl groups and a low tolerance for accordions.)

Ok, one more: a very young Liberace, having a grand old time playing the song, lit up in smlies and throwing out extravagant “hand-jumps”, and meanwhile tachnically superb.

The Rosamunde Sausage Grill. Pulling up these Rosamunde sites led me to a San Francisco “Bar & Grill – Beer Garden – Gastropub”, the Rosamunde Sausage Grill, with five locations: the Mission in SF, the Haight in SF, downtown Oakland, Temescal in Oakland, and the East Coast outpost, in Willliamsburg, Brooklyn. The place is rich in both craft beers and sausages (standard ones and inventive ones).

I’m guessing that the name Rosemunde comes from the “Beer Barrel Polka”, but I can’t find a source that sheds light on its naming, so that’s just a guess. But with sausages we are in the realm of phallic symbols — both for the sausages on their own, as in this display of the place’s wares:

(#3)

and also in its logo:

(#4)

and in the image of a sausage charmer it uses on the shirts it sells:

(#5)

(sausage as symbolic penis, snake as symbolic penis, and flute as symbolic penis — a triple-header, so to speak).

In my posting on things Rosamunde, I provided a video of the German singer Heino performing the hymn to beer-drinking “Rosamunde”. Now more information about the man, from Wikipedia:

Heino (born 13 December 1938 as Heinz Georg Kramm) is a German singer of popular music (Schlager) and traditional Volksmusik. Having sold a total of over 50 million records, he is one of the most successful German musicians ever.
Known for his baritone voice and trademark combination of light blond hair and dark sunglasses (which he wears due to exophthalmos [bulging eyeballs, from Graves’ disease]), Heino resides in the town of Bad Münstereifel, where he owned a cafe until June 2012. His interest in music started when his mother gave him an accordion in 1948, although his family could barely afford it.

Heino and his wife Hannelore in 2008:

Most of his [early] recordings were pop versions of traditional folk songs; for example, “How Blue Blooms the Gentian” (Blau Blüht Der Enzian), an adaptation of the folk song “The Swiss Maiden” (Das Schweizermaedel).

And of course “Edelweiss”, and lots of beer-drinking songs.

Also a song he first recorded in 1968 under the title “Zu der Ponderosa reiten wir” (‘We are riding to the Ponderosa’), which I didn’t recognize under that name, though it pretty much had to be American in origin. Turns out it’s “She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes”! From YouTube (audio only):

Translating material from popular culture from one language to another is notoriously tricky, often requiring the creation of entirely new material to get an equivalent feeling in the translating language. Here’s the beginning of “She’ll be coming” as Heino performs it (from a Heino lyrics site):

Zu der Ponderosa reiten wir,
zu den Bergen, die so weit von hier,
Glück und Sehnsucht uns begleiten,
wenn wir durch die Steppe reiten,
zu der Ponderosa reiten wir

In den Bergen suchen wir nach Gold,
wo es stürmt und wo der Donner grollt.
Fürchten keine Indianer, nicht Apachen, Mohikaner,
unser allerbester Freund das ist der Colt

Und wir singen Jipi, jipi, jei, und wir singen Jipi, jipi, jei
in den grünen Fernen, in den blauen Bergen
suchen wir den Schatz von Silbersee

(“Jipi, jipi, jei” is a German spelling for “Yippee, yippee, yay”).

Now there are a great many variants in English, some of them with religious content and many with inscrutable lyrics (involving red pajamas and Grandma’s dumplings, plus the six white horses), but all that is jettisoned in the German version, which is firmly set in California’s Gold Rush days, complete with armed clashes with the Indians (in my favorite couplet, boldfaced above; note that there were neither Apaches nor Mohicans in California, but the words in German scan really well, and Mohikaner ‘Mohicans’ is a perfect rhyme for Indianer ‘Indians’). Really an entirely new song, equipped with the German themes of adventuring far from home, beset by (roughly) longing (Gm. Sehnsucht, the theme of famous poems by Schiller and Goethe)

Today’s Zippy takes us to Seattle:

(#1)

The pop-culture experience of the EMP Museum.

An aerial view of the real thing:

(#2)

From the twisted imaginings of Zippy to Seattle Center!

From Wikipedia:

EMP Museum is a nonprofit museum [in Seattle WA], dedicated to contemporary popular culture. … The museum, formerly known as Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (EMPSFM), has founded numerous public programs including Sound Off! an annual 21 and under battle-of-the-bands that supports the all-ages scene and Pop Conference an annual gathering of academics, critics, musicians and music buffs.

[It has the] largest collections in the world of rare artifacts, hand-written lyrics, personal instruments, and original photographs celebrating the music and history of Seattle musicians Nirvana and Jimi Hendrix.

EMP is located on the campus of Seattle Center, adjacent to the Space Needle and the Seattle Center Monorail, which runs through the building. The structure itself was designed by Frank Gehry, and resembles many of his firm’s other works in its sheet-metal construction, such as Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and Gehry Tower. Much of the building material is exposed in the building’s interior. The building contains 140,000 square feet (13,000 m2), with a 35,000-square-foot (3,300 m2) footprint. The name of the museum’s central Sky Church pays homage to Jimi Hendrix.

… Even before groundbreaking, Seattle Weekly said the design could refer to “the often quoted comparison to a smashed electric guitar.” Indeed, Gehry himself had made the comparison, “We started collecting pictures of Stratocasters, bringing in guitar bodies, drawing on those shapes in developing our ideas.” The architecture was greeted by Seattle residents with a mixture of acclaim for Gehry and derision for this particular edifice.

The critics have not been kind.

(#3)

Hendrix with Stratocaster

Another in a series of postings on actors, especially on tv, whose work I’ve enjoyed. Today it’s Thomas Gibson, currently playing the central character in the tv series Criminal Minds (which I’ve posted about several times before and will post more about in a while). Gibson had a significant stage career before he broke into movies and tv. On tv, he’s had four meaty roles, playing four very different characters, and has been a dependable guest actor. His movies are all over the map; some are notable failures as movies, though Gibson soldiered on though them as an actor.

Here’s the man looking seriously FBI on Criminal Minds:

(#1)

And in a very different mood on the earlier series Dharma & Greg:

(#2)

From Wikipedia:

Thomas Ellis Gibson (born July 3, 1962) is an American actor and director. He is best known for his portrayal of Daniel Nyland in the CBS series Chicago Hope [1994-98], Greg Montgomery on the ABC series Dharma & Greg [1997-2003], and Aaron Hotchner on the CBS series Criminal Minds [2005-present].

… Gibson’s first television appearance was in 1987 in a guest role on CBS’ legal drama Leg Work, followed by stints on the daytime dramas As the World Turns (CBS) and Another World (NBC). In 1992, Gibson made his big screen debut in Ron Howard’s Far and Away, in which he portrayed Stephen Chase. Chase was the villainous rival of Joseph Donnelly (Tom Cruise) for Shannon Christie’s (Nicole Kidman) affections. His next lead role was in 1993 as David, a homosexual waiter, in Denys Arcand’s Love and Human Remains. Gibson later re-united with Arcand in Stardom (2000). Also in 1993, he played the slimy misanthrope Beauchamp Day in the Tales of the City miniseries (1993 [and 1998]).

The four meaty roles: Beauchamp Day in the the first two of the three tv miniseries based on Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City stories; Dr. Daniel Nyland in the medical drama Chicago Hope; Greg Montgomery (playing opposite Jenna Elfman’s fey character Dharma, Greg’s wife) in the delightful sitcom Dharma & Greg; and Aaron Hotchner, the head of a team of FBI profilers, in Criminal Minds. (Two cast photos for CM in a 10/8/15 posting of mine; and further discussion in a 11/10/15 posting about CM cast member Matthew Gray Gubler.)

Beauchamp Day. The narcissistic Beauchamp (pronounced like Beacham) cheats on his wife (DeDe Halcyon Day, played by Barbara Garrick) with Jon Fielding (Billy Campbell) and with Mary Ann Singleton (Laura Linney), both of whom end up detesting him. Here’s Beauchamp with an unhappy DeDe:

(#3)

and with Jon:

(#4)

A thorough scoundrel. He dies in a car accident after putting out a hit on DeDe’s unborn twins (no, he’s not the father).

Dr. Daniel Nyland. Chicago Hope had a large regular cast, which was jam-packed with reliable character actors. Wikipedia on Nyland:

Thomas Gibson played Dr. Daniel Nyland, a promiscuous ER doctor and trauma surgeon who was later suspended due to him having an affair with a patient’s family member and later was injured in a car crash.

Sexual promiscuity and car crashes. I sense a theme here. Though Dr. Nyland was an engaging character (despite his inability to keep it in his pants) with a sweet smile:

(#5)

At the movies. Several of the movies Gibson has acted in are justly well-regarded films, but the man has also signed on to a number of ill-conceived film projects. From these bad choices, two comedies that happen to have been released in 2000: The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas and  Psycho Beach Party. I haven’t seen either of them, but just reading about them gives me the giggles.

Wikipedia on Viva Rock Vegas:

The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (also known as The Flintstones 2 or The Flintstones 2: Viva Rock Vegas) is a 2000 American comedy film and prequel to 1994’s The Flintstones, based on the 1960–66 cartoon series of the same name. Produced by Amblin Entertainment and Hanna-Barbera Productions and distributed by Universal Pictures, it is set before the events of the first film and features very few of the original cast. Even though the film was a critical and commercial failure, it received slightly more positive reviews than the first film. Ann-Margret, who appeared as “Ann-Margrock” in the original series, sings the theme song, which is a slightly rewritten version of the theme song from Viva Las Vegas.

… Wilma Slaghoople (Kristen Johnston) wants a normal life and activities, like bowling, despite her controlling mother Pearl (Joan Collins) who wants her to marry smooth casino-owner Chip Rockefeller (Thomas Gibson).

Here’s Gibson as Rockefeller:

(#6)

Hot, but really cheesy.

Wikipedia on Psycho Beach Party:

Psycho Beach Party is a 2000 comedy horror film based on the off-Broadway play of the same name, directed by Robert Lee King. Charles Busch wrote both the original play and the screenplay. As the title suggests, Psycho Beach Party, set in 1962 Malibu Beach, is a parody of 1950s psychodramas, 1960s beach movies and 1980s slasher films.

A poster for the movie, featuring a shirtless Gibson and his really big surfboard:

(#7)

In the middle cameo at the top: Gibson (playing the surfing guru The Great Kanaka) and a surfer-dude character played by Nicholas Brendon, showing off their excellent shirts. In a close-up:

(#8)

Yes, Nicholas Brendon, who played Xander on Buffy; for more on him, see here.

The red-haired woman in the right cameo at the top is in fact Charles Busch in drag. Busch and Gibson together, in a thumbnail:

(#9)

Of course, we’re at the beach, so there’s plenty of shirtless Gibson:

(#10)

(Attractive body, definitely fit but not gym-sculpted.)

Alas, deliberate camp is hard to pull off, and reviewers were mostly not kind.

In pursuit of something else, I came across a Gawker piece from 3/31/14 that began with this identification:

(1) Silver wolverine Animorph and CNN anchor Anderson Cooper

This led quickly into a dense thicket of popular culture, taking me into the comics, the movies, sexual slang, action figures, Canadian currency, language play, fierce animals, and more. (There will be some discussion of man-man sex in plain terms here, but nothing alarming, and the images aren’t X-rated.)

My route to Anderson Cooper started with recent postings of mine on uses of the word cocksucker — which led to an interview of Cooper on the question, an interview in which (deliciously) he used the word several times, though pausing briefly each time before blurting it out. The Gawker piece (by J.K. Trotter) was a report on that interview.

Some relevant background on Cooper, from Wikipedia:

Anderson Hays Cooper (born June 3, 1967) is an American journalist, author, and television personality. He is the primary anchor of the CNN news show Anderson Cooper 360°. The program is normally broadcast live from a New York City studio; however, Cooper often broadcasts live on location for breaking news stories.

… Cooper and his boyfriend, gay bar owner Benjamin Maisani, have been dating since 2009.

Cooper has been openly gay since 2012. Maisani was born January 27, 1973, in Corsica, France; that makes him six years younger than Cooper, who, because of his silver hair, looks older than he is, even when he’s groomed for youthfulness:

(#1)

Maisani and Cooper on the street together in NYC:

(#2)

Lots and lots of photos of the couple — in suits on public occasions, riding bikes together, walking the dog, Maisani cuddled on Cooper’s shoulder, and so on. Maisani seems to be hunkier than Cooper, but he also seems to be subordinate in their relationship. It’s not at all uncommon for an older gay man to pair with a younger one, often with an emotional resonance of subordination, and there are men who seek out such relationships, having a preference for one or the other role in them.

[Digression: there are two dimensions here: the emotional resonance of a dominant-subordinate relationship, which for gay men can be ritualized as a “Daddy – Boy” pairing and is in principle independent of age (and physical size and strength); and a preference for a younger or older partner, which is in principle independent of the emotional resonance between the men. In male-female pairings, it’s so common for men to prefer relationships with younger women that there’s no standard term for a man who seeks out such relationships; but for a woman who seeks out relationships with younger men, we now have the slang term cougar; see my 7/14/14 posting “The animal report”, which has a section on cougars in this sense.

In related news, this blog now has a “Daddy – Boy, DILF” Page (under “Xwriting”/”XBlog essays”), where DILF is ‘Dad / Daddy I’d like to fuck’ (see in particular my 6/13/14 posting “DILF days”).]

That brings me to the question: what do you call a gay cougar? People have suggested pink panther, playing on the Pink Panther cartoons and movies, on pink as a gay color, and on the panther as another fierce cat; and gougar, a portmanteau of gay cougar. Now it looks like J.K. Trotter, who did the Gawker piece, fixed on wolverine (another fierce animal of wild Canada), giving us silver wolverine Animorph to refer to Cooper: silver for his hair, wolverine for his relationship with the younger Maisani.

I’ll get to the Animorphs in a bit, but first two other kinds of silver wolverine.

A wolverine on a silver coin. From a site offering coins for sale, a

(2) 2014 Canada 20 Dollar Silver Wolverine

(#3)

(Gulo gulo is the scientific name of the wolverine; gulo is Latin for ‘glutton’. Some discussion of the animal at the bottom of this posting.)

A silver-colored Wolverine action figure. For the 25th (silver) anniversary (2007) of the Marvel Comics character Wolverine, we got the

(3) Marvel Legends Silver Wolverine action figure

by sculptor Dave Cortez:

(#4)

On Wolverine, from Wikipedia:

Wolverine is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics, most often in relation to the X-Men superhero team.

Born James Howlett and commonly known as Logan, Wolverine is a mutant who possesses animal-keen senses, enhanced physical capabilities, and powerful regenerative ability known as a healing factor. … The character first appeared in the last panel of The Incredible Hulk #180, with his first full appearance in #181 (cover-dated Nov. 1974).

… Wolverine is typical of the many tough antiheroes that emerged in American popular culture after the Vietnam War; his willingness to use deadly force and his brooding nature became standard characteristics for comic book antiheroes by the end of the 1980s. As a result, the character became a fan favorite of the increasingly popular X-Men franchise. Wolverine has been featured in his own solo comic since 1988.

He has appeared in most X-Men adaptations, including animated television series, video games, and the live-action 20th Century Fox X-Men film series, in which he is portrayed by Hugh Jackman in all eight films

Wolverine in the comics:

(#5)

And as portrayed in the movies by a frighteningly ripped Hugh Jackman:

(#6)

For a photo of Jackman looking like an ordinary human being (in a mullet), see this posting from 10/9/15.

Finally, the Animorphs.From Wikipedia:

Animorphs is an English language science fiction series of young adult books written by K. A. Applegate and published by Scholastic. It is told in first person, with all six main characters taking turns narrating the books through their own perspectives. Horror, war, dehumanization, sanity, morality, innocence, leadership, freedom, and growing up are the core themes of the series.

Published between June 1996 and May 2001, the series consisted of 54 books and includes ten companion books, eight of which fit into the series’ continuity (the Animorphs Chronicles and Megamorphs books) and two that are gamebooks not fitting into the continuity (the Alternamorphs books).

The story revolves around five humans, Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel, and Tobias, and one alien, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill (nicknamed Ax), who obtain the ability to transform into any animal they touch. Naming themselves “Animorphs” (a portmanteau of “animal morphers”), they use their ability to battle a secret alien infiltration of Earth by a parasitic race of aliens

The books were developed into

a 26-episode television adaptation made by Nickelodeon … The series was broadcast from September 1998 to March 2000 in the United States and Canada (Wikipedia link)

In any case, it looks like the writer Trotter of (1) was playing with two senses of wolverine in it: Cooper exemplifying the gay equivalent of cougar, and a fierce creature that Cooper is able to animorph into.

Here’s the creature:

(#7)

Some discussion of Gulo gulo in my “Nicknames and mascots” posting of 8/24/12. Not a creature you would want to tangle with.

The illustration:

(#1)

From a piece in BuzzFeed yesterday, “the first images of the live-action film, The Legend of Tarzan, have been released and they are quite simply [hot hot hot]” by Kimberley Dadds:

The first official stills, featuring Alexander Skarsgård as the main man Tarzan, were released on Wednesday and they’re heavenly.

(Hat tip to Mike McKinley.)

Skarsgård has always kept himself in great shape, but here his body is extraordinarily (even unnaturally) ripped, along the lines of the photo I posted a couple of days ago of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

Shirtless hunks are a recurrent theme on this blog. In fact, there is a Page on “Shirtless postings”, with the note:

excluded, for the most part: photos of men who are shirtless by virtue of their occupations — pornstars, underwear models, models for male photographers, swimmers and divers, dancers

There are some postings on the Page with photos of men in the generally excluded groups, but mostly the photos there are of actors (like Skarsgård and Jackman) and athletes other than swimmers and divers (tennis players, soccer players, baseball players, etc.).

A note: the adjective ripped in NOAD2:

informal   having well-defined or well-developed muscles; muscular: through his slightly-too-tight shirt you could see he was ripped | they’re going to the gym daily to get buff pecs, ripped abs, and tight buns.

Massive musculature is not necessarily the main point here, but a high level of fitness combined with extremely low bodyfat is, and in today’s world, abs have taken center stage (see the 8/2/13 posting “It’s all about the abs”, with 5 photos from a Hunk of the Month calendar), while in earlier days men focused primarily on their pecs and biceps.

On to Skarsgård and then to Tarzan.

The actor. From Wikipedia:

Alexander Johan Hjalmar Skarsgård (… born August 25, 1976) is a Swedish actor. He is best known for his roles as vampire Eric Northman on the HBO series True Blood, Meekus in Zoolander and Brad Colbert in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill. He is the son of Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård.

Ah, the vampire connection; these days, vampirism (like lycanthropy) is associated with intensely sexy masculine shirtlessness.

Here’s Skarsgård, displaying his body and offering an armpit, in a sexy shot from somewhat earlier in his career.

(#2)

He’s harder-core now, more developed, and scruffier too, as here (where he is, however, fully clothed):

(#3)

The Tarzan story. From Wikipedia:

Tarzan (John Clayton, Viscount Greystoke) is a fictional character, an archetypal feral child raised in the African jungles by the Mangani great apes; he later experiences civilization only to largely reject it and return to the wild as a heroic adventurer. Created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan first appeared in the novel Tarzan of the Apes (magazine publication 1912, book publication 1914), and subsequently in twenty-five sequels, several authorized books by other authors, and innumerable works in other media, both authorized and unauthorized.

… The Internet Movie Database lists 200 movies with Tarzan in the title between 1918 and 2014. The first Tarzan movies were silent pictures adapted from the original Tarzan novels, which appeared within a few years of the character’s creation. The first actor to portray the adult Tarzan was Elmo Lincoln in 1918’s Tarzan Of The Apes. With the advent of talking pictures, a popular Tarzan movie franchise was developed, which lasted from the 1930s through the 1960s. Starting with Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932 through twelve films until 1948, the franchise was anchored by former Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller in the title role. Weissmuller and his immediate successors were enjoined to portray the ape-man as a noble savage speaking broken English, in marked contrast to the cultured aristocrat of Burroughs’s novels.

With the exception of the Burroughs co-produced The New Adventures of Tarzan, this “me Tarzan, you Jane” characterization of Tarzan persisted until the late 1950s, when producer Sy Weintraub, having bought the film rights from producer Sol Lesser, produced Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure followed by eight other films and a television series. The Weintraub productions portray a Tarzan that is closer to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original concept in the novels: a jungle lord who speaks grammatical English and is well educated and familiar with civilization.

… There were also several serials and features that competed with the main franchise, including Tarzan the Fearless (1933) starring Buster Crabbe and The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935) starring Herman Brix.

A poster for the 1933 movie, with Buster Crabbe (another Olympic swimmer, who had a long career in movie serials — as Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers — as well as in single movies):

(#4)

(I’m very fond of Crabbe, much more than Weismuller.)

The Jane is Jacqueline Wells, who later changed her name to Julie Bishop.

Note that Crabbe is hunky, but mostly in the pecs and biceps (plus big shoulders).

Then to Weissmuller, Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942):

(#5)

Cheeta the chimp, Boy (Johnny Sheffield), Weissmuller as Tarzan, Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan)

Well-developed pecs and biceps, powerful shoulders, but no work on the abs.

Two days ago I posted a Mother Goose and Grimm strip on New Year’s resolution (#1 there, with the character Ralph confusing resolution and revolution). Now comes a Eugene Chan cartoon with a musical pun on resolution:

(#1)

It resolves to a G minor triad.

From NOAD2 on some senses of resolution::

1 a firm decision to do or not to do something: she kept her resolution not to see Anne any more | a New Year’s resolution.

2 the action of solving a problem, dispute, or contentious matter: the peaceful resolution of all disputes | a successful resolution to the problem.

[2a] Music the passing of a discord into a concord during the course of changing harmony.

The sense in New Year’s resolution as ordinarily understood is 1. The sense in #1 is 2a.

When I first saw #1 on Facebook, I took it to be an musically clever xkcd cartoon, but then I saw the link, to Chan’s website don’t shoot the pianist: he is doing the best he can. The site’s name is a film allusion; from Wikipedia:

Shoot the Piano Player (French: Tirez sur le pianiste; UK title: Shoot the Pianist) is a 1960 French crime drama film directed by François Truffaut and starring Charles Aznavour as the titular pianist. It is based on the novel Down There by David Goodis.

(#2)

#1 also made my body ache sympathetically, since the pianist appeared to be performing in a sitting position but without a piano bench. Chan explained on Facebook that he has trouble drawing piano benches.

I don’t know much about Chan — his website is not at all informative — beyond the facts that in addition to being a stick-figure cartoonist, he has or has had some connection to Canada, given his website’s address; that he’s a serious pianist and enthusiast of pianos, piano music, and pianists; that he’s inclined to language play; and that he’s a great admirer of Randall Munroe (also a stick-figure cartoonist given to language play) and his xkcd cartoons. Chan’s website even has an archive arranged just like Munroe’s for xkcd.

Many intriguing things on the archive, including a maddening series of postings on “Pieces You Can Probably Identify: Given only the first note(s)”. You really need to know the piano literature upside and down to play that game.

From that archive, I checked out the intriguingly named “Chopin’s Bolero”, which culminates in a wonderful imperfect pun:

(#3)

Two ingredients here: the bolero as a musical composition; and “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition”.

The bolero and Ravel’s Boléro. From Wikipedia:

Bolero is a genre of slow-tempo Latin music and its associated dance. There are Spanish and Cuban forms which are both significant and which have separate origins.

The term is also used for some art music. In all its forms, the bolero has been popular for over a century.

The bolero is a 3/4 dance that originated in Spain in the late 18th century, a combination of the contradanza and the sevillana. Dancer Sebastiano Carezo is credited with inventing the dance in 1780. It is danced by either a soloist or a couple. It is in a moderately slow tempo and is performed to music which is sung and accompanied by castanets and guitars with lyrics of five to seven syllables in each of four lines per verse. It is in triple time and usually has a triplet on the second beat of each bar.

(The Cuban bolero, which spread from its Cuban origin in the last quarter of the 19th century to Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the rest of Latin America, is distinct, as a musical form and as a dance.)

Here’s the bolero rhythm:

(#4)

You will recognize this as the underlying rhythm of a famous Ravel composition — about which, the beginning of the Wikipedia article:

Boléro is a one-movement orchestral piece by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937). Originally composed as a ballet commissioned by Russian actress and dancer Ida Rubinstein, the piece, which premiered in 1928, is Ravel’s most famous musical composition

In case you are not already afflicted by a Ravel earworm, you can listen to the whole thing here (it’s long, 17:22 in this performance by the Vienna Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel).

The piece builds slowly, getting faster and faster and louder and louder until it climaxes — musically, but mimicking sexual climax — in a wild, clashing finale.

Not expecting the Spanish Inquisition. Now the Spanish composition takes us into Monty Python territory. From Wikipedia:

“The Spanish Inquisition” is a series of sketches in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Series 2 Episode 2, first broadcast 22 September 1970, parodying the real-life Spanish Inquisition. This episode is itself entitled “The Spanish Inquisition”. The sketches are notable for their principal catchphrase, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”. The end of the sketch uses music from the composition Devil’s Galop by Charles Williams.

This is a recurring sketch always predicated on an unrelated sketch in which one character mentions that they “didn’t expect a Spanish Inquisition!”, often in irritation at being questioned by another. At this point, the Inquisition — consisting of Cardinal Ximénez (Michael Palin) and his assistants Cardinal Biggles (Terry Jones) (who resembles his namesake wearing a leather aviator’s helmet and goggles) and Cardinal Fang (Terry Gilliam) — burst into the room to the sound of a jarring musical sting. Ximénez shouts, with a particular and high-pitched emphasis on the first syllable: “NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

The Inquisitors are ridiculously incompetent on several fronts (listing their weapons and achieving torture, in particular).

You can watch the complete series of sketches here (the video is 8:41).

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” rapidly achieved pop-culture celebrity as a catchphrase.

It started innocently enough, with a Jack Ziegler cartoon in the January 11th New Yorker:

(#1)

Captain Ahab, identifiable through his peg leg and harpoon,  is apparently looking for his whale in a book store (where he will, no doubt, find copies of Moby-Dick, but no whales). Of course, the cartoon isn’t comprehensible if you don’t know the outlines of the story, but more than that, Ahab and the White Whale have become stock figures in popular culture, and, indeed, a conventional theme of gag cartoons: a cartoon meme.

I then went to search on {Ahab cartoon}, so that I could justify the claim that there was such a meme, and was inundated with examples. In fact, I was inundated with examples from the New Yorker alone, including two more by Jack Ziegler. I stopped collecting them when I had 10 single-panel cartoons plus a New Yorker cover. God only knows how many more there are.

Background, from Wikipedia:

Captain Ahab is a fictional character in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), the monomaniacal captain of the whaling ship Pequod. On a previous voyage, the white [sperm] whale Moby Dick bit off Ahab’s leg, leaving him with a prosthesis made out of whalebone. Instead of leading the Pequod on a whaling voyage for profit, Ahab seeks revenge on the whale and casts his spell over the crew-members to enlist them in his fanatical mission. When Moby Dick is finally sighted and hunted down, Ahab’s hate robs him of all caution and denies him revenge. Moby Dick drags Ahab to his death.

… Ahab is firmly established in popular culture by cartoons, comic books, films and plays. Most famously, he provided J. M. Barrie with the model for his Captain Hook character [in Peter Pan], who is obsessed not with a whale but a crocodile.

On to the cartoons. From Ziegler, published 12/6/10: Ahab sings [Irving] Berlin!:

(#2)

And then an unpublished Ziegler available in the magazine’s Cartoon Bank, with Ahab and a bottle of White Whale Brand Grog:

(#3)

One more unpublished cartoon from the Cartoon Bank, by J.P. Rini (new to this blog), with a travel agent who clearly doesn’t distinguish whales and Wales:

(#4)

Then another newcomer to this blog, Sidney Harris, Ahab with the whale mounted on a plaque (published 10/29/90:

(#5)

On to an artist who’s appeared once on this blog before, Glen Le Lievre, with the whale stuck on a subway car filled with Ahab-type whalers (published 3/3/08):

(#6)

Then an artist who’s appeared twice on this blog before, David Borchart, with Ahab raging at the whale, who’s just bitten off his other leg (published 1/24/11):

(#7)

(I note that of the 8 images in this posting where you can tell which of Ahab’s legs was lost in the original encounter with the whale, it’s 5 Ls to 3 Rs; even Ziegler (with 2 Ls to 1 R) is not consistent.)

On to three artists who (like Jack Ziegler) have appeared on this blog often enough to get their own Pages, starting with Danny Shanahan, who appears twice in the current set of cartoons: in a 8/11/14 cartoon with a retired Ahab, with a peg leg shaped like a rocking chair’s leg; and in a 9/20/10 cartoon showing a post-coital Ahab, with his bed-partner complaining accusatorily, “You called me Ishmael!”:

(#8)

(#9)

(Note that Ahab is missing his L leg in #8, his R in #9.)

Ahab does have an unnamed young wife in the book, and the woman in #9 might be her, or she might be a dalliance of the captain’s. In any case, the allusion here is to the first line of the book, the narrator saying “Call me Ishmael”. But in #9, Ahab called the woman Ishmael, presumably in the heat of intercourse, which has led some commenters to suggest that the cartoon depicts an Ahab with some sexual attraction to men — a man like the narrator Ishmael himself, whose relationship (intimate and quite possibly sexual) to the Pequod crewmember Queequeg has been much discussed in the literature on the book.

(Further note: some of the images in this posting are clearly set in the modern world, far removed from the mid-19th-century setting of the book: notably #1, in a modern book store, and #4, in a modern travel agency. But the setting in #9 is plausibly from the era of the book, a fact that adds to the distinctly literary — and New Yorker-esque — character of the cartoon.)

Now a 4/22/13 cartoon from Mick Stevens, showing a disappointed Ahab, who has tracked down a red whale instead of the white one he was hoping for:

(#10)

So much for the crop of cartoons. That leaves the master of New Yorker covers, Bruce McCall, here with a wonderfully silly cover from 6/30/14, showing a breaching sperm whale with advertising on its side for

Cap’n Ahab’s
A “Whale” of a Burger!

(#11)

If you can put ads on the sides of buses, why not on the sides of breaching whales?

(Many breaching whales do back flips. This one is doing a front leap — easier to recognize the species and read the ad.)

It turns out that I have posted Ahab/whale cartoons on this blog before, but only three times; I generally post a cartoon because there’s some linguistic point in it, not just because I found it funny, though I do post occasionally about cartoon memes (as I have just done here). Earlier postings:

“Idioms” (link):  #2 Wrong Hands cartoon by John Atkinson

“Captain Rehab” (link): Speed Bump cartoon by Dave Coverly

“You must remember this” (link): #2 Zach Kanin cartoon in the New Yorker (yes, again the New Yorker)

Oh, yes: Atkinson R leg, the other two L leg.

A recent Zippy, continuing a series with burlesques of quotes from famous writers (previously: Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Joan Didion):

This time it’s Marcel Proust (under the name Darnell Prouty — cue Olive Higgins Prouty, author of the 1922 novel Stella Dallas and the 1941 novel Now, Voyager, both of which became famous in adaptations, as a movie and a radio soap opera in the first case and a movie in the second). Once again, the writer is caricatured, dressed in a Pinhead muumuu. With the quotations amended by references to snack foods (Chips Ahoy and Little Debbies) and pop culture figures (Rosemary Clooney, Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas).

This time I’ll give only one of the original quotations, the one for the third panel, the beginning of this material from volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) — also translated as Remembrance of Things Past (as translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin) — the volume In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919), also translated as Within a Budding Grove):

Let but a single flash of reality — the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind — enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.

Zippy continues today with another set of burlesques on quotations from famous writers:

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the ridiculous guise of F-Stop Fitznebbish, and (like those who have preceded him) caricatured in a Pinhead muumuu.

Panel 1 takes off from a letter Fitzgerald wrote (from Hollywood) on July 29th, 1940:

Isn’t Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

This has been turned into a catalogue of things from a town dump, plus unproduced screenplays.

Panel 2 has material from two sources: from Fizgerald’s notebooks, in Notebook E, the famous:

Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.

And then from The Great Gatsby:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Boats against the current is transformed into coats all dense with courants (currants in an odd spelling, continuing the food theme?), and past becomes pesto (more food).

Panel 3 introduces material from popular culture, namely the actor Val Kilmer as the Dark Knight (not Night) Batman in Joel Schumacher’s 1995 Batman Forever, and Kilmer is folded into the Gatsby quote, complete with pesto.

It started with a cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti (from 1/18/10) in my doctor’s examining room yesterday:

(#1)

Angry doctor upbraids a smugly smiling patient (hugely obese, cocktail in hand, cigar in mouth).

Barsotti is a great favorite of mine, and he has his own Page on this blog.

So: four more Barsottis that tickle me and haven’t been blogged on here before.

On relations between the sexes, from 4/10/95:

(#2)

Male corkscrew, female cork. He has just screwed her and is now walking away. Plaintively, she hopes he will call her. But probably not: he looks like a 3Fs, or FFF, guy: Find ’em, Fuck ’em, Forget ’em. There’s a lot of that going around.

Now on female friendships, and talk between women, from 11/7/94:

(#3)

Conventions: the heels and lashes tell you that, though they are both forks, they’re also both female. The spaghetti wrapped in #2’s tines represents her hair — apparently, a brand-new hairdo, which #1 greatly admires.

More social customs, with a fish in a dog bar (from 11/13/14):

(#4)

The compound dog bar is an instance of one prominent type of X bar snowclonelet, where bar denotes an “establishment where alcohol and sometimes other refreshments are served” (link to my X bar posting of 10/18/14), and X characterizes its patrons (gay bar, biker bar, etc.). The idea of a dog bar is charming, and a fish pretending to be a dog to get in makes the whole scene really goofy.

And finally, a clown seeking help, from 1/9/95:

(#5)

Apparently laughter is not the best medicine for this clown, whose business it is to make people laugh. The word on the net is that Xanax is the next best thing, almost as good as laughter itself.

“Laughter is the best medicine” is something of a trial for quote detectives. The general idea has been formulated in a variety of ways over millennia, but this particular wording, which has become a fixed formula in popular culture, hasn’t been traced to its source.

I’ll probably assemble another set of Barsotti cartoons in a while. The corpus at the New Yorker archives is immense.

Today’s Zippy returns to Elgar Durwin Poboy and perhaps his most famous poem, “Once upon a bowling alley”, ultimately about those campfire treats s’mores:

We last heard about Elgar Durwin Poboy in a January 7th posting, which had only a bit of the Edgar Allan Poe poem “The Raven” that E. D. Poboy pays homage to here.

Lots of word substitutions, repeated references to bowling, plus some place names (Hoboken, West New Haven) and a figure (Charlie Callas) from pop culture.