The Bizarro of the 25th:

An imperfect pun: hanger /hæŋǝr/ vs. anger /æŋgǝr/. Note the divergent treatment of orthographic NG in medial position: typically /ŋ/ before agentive or instrumental /ǝr/, but /ŋg/ otherwise. (There are well-known exceptions, like dinghy, with /ŋ/; and medial NG sometimes spells /nǰ/, as in dingy.)

A story that’s been making the rounds; I first saw it in “News of the Weird” in Funny Times; here’s a version from Yahoo! Lifestyle on June 11th, “Does your tackle need tightening? How George Clooney is inspiring men to go nuts and take pride in polishing their Crown Jewels” (someone at the site just couldn’t resist the language play) by Penny Newton, beginning:

If you ever hear a bloke talk about tightening the tackle, you could be forgiven for thinking that he’s off on a fishing trip with his buddies.

But chances are, his talking about something very different – and we’ve got George Clooney to thank.

The Hollywood hunk, who has constantly joked about getting his testicles “ironed out”, has sparked a new craze with one beauty spa saying they’ve been “inundated” with requests, reports the Daily Mail.

More details from Yahoo!:

Santa Monica spa Beauty Park referrs to the non-surgical treatment as a ‘Male Laser Lift’, where lasers are used to remove hair, erase wrinkles, correct discoloration on the scrotum, and generally improve “tone and texture in the area.”

The process takes a little over an hour. Results usually last four weeks and around six sessions are needed for lasting results.

Clooney, who gave an interview with [Italy’s] Max magazine this year admitted that while he never fixed his eyes, he “spent more money to stretch the skin of my testicles.

“I did not like the wrinkles. It’s a new technique, many people in Hollywood have done it. It’s called ‘ball ironing.’”

Jamie [Sherrill, co-owner of the spa], who has treated many celebrities, decided to investigate tackle tightening after being swamped with requests.

“Men are becoming more comfortable with their grooming habits,” she said.

From the spa’s site (with links to other media coverage):

Male Bikini Laser Treatment

The popular male laser treatment has recently been extensively talked about in the news and by celebrities, and is often referred to by  the media as “ball ironing”, “tighten the tackle” and “scrotal lift”.

This non-invasive, non-surgical treatment is applied to male scrotal area to help regain a more youthful look.

$575

So: the technical-sounding male (bikini) laser treatment and male laser lift (parallel to bust lift), neither naming the body-part in question. And then the more direct scrotal lift and the playful tackle-tightening and (my favorite) ball ironing.

Still, it hadn’t occurred to me to strive for more youthful balls. But then my balls have never been tight; that’s just the way I hang.

(My searches for good before and after photos to put on AZBlogX have so far been unsuccessful.)

Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine:

An outrageous pun, with which Goat taxes the cartoonist, Stephan Pastis.

From the Wikipedia page on Pastis, this quotation from the cartoonist:

“[Charles 'Sparky'] Schulz is to comic strips what Marlon Brando was to acting. It was so revolutionary. Before ‘Peanuts,’ the writing was physical, over the top, but Sparky goes inside the soul. His influence on me is enormous. I’ve taken his backgrounds, the front porch, the beach and the TV beanbag. Rat is Lucy, Goat is Linus and Pig is Charlie Brown. Sparky is a template, whether or not you know it, he’s the template.”

The elaborate puns don’t come from Sparky, though.

It seems to have started with Joy of Cooking, but it eventually led to lots of other titles, including (via The Joy of Sex) to the webcomic The Joy of Tech and the baseball fansite The Joy of Sox.

The original:

Joy of Cooking, often known as “The Joy of Cooking”, is one of the United States’ most-published cookbooks, and has been in print continuously since 1936 and with more than 18 million copies sold. It was privately published in 1931 by Irma S. Rombauer, a homemaker in St. Louis, Missouri, who was struggling emotionally and financially after her husband’s suicide the previous year. Rombauer had 3,000 copies printed by A.C. Clayton, a company which had printed labels for fancy St. Louis shoe companies and for Listerine, but never a book. In 1936, the book was picked up by a commercial printing house, the Bobbs-Merrill Company. Joy is the backbone of many home cooks’ libraries and is commonly found in commercial kitchens as well. (Wikipedia link)

The cookbook lent its name to a band:

Joy of Cooking was an American folk-rock band formed in 1967 in Berkeley, California. It was led by two women, pianist Toni Brown and guitarist Terry Garthwaite (also known as Ruby Green). The rest of the band consisted of bass guitarist David Garthwaite (Terry’s brother), drummer Fritz Kasten and percussion player Ron Wilson. Keyboard player Stevie Roseman replaced Toni Brown for a time and bass players Happy Smith and eventually Jeff Neighbor replaced David Garthwaite on bass guitar. The music was a mix of “hippy” sensibility on blues and folk roots, and the lyrics often reflected feminist or environmental themes. (Wikipedia link)

Then came The Joy of Sex:

The Joy of Sex is an illustrated sex manual by British author Alex Comfort, M.B., Ph.D., first published in 1972. An updated edition was released in September, 2008.

… The original intention was to use the same approach as such cook books as The Joy of Cooking, hence section titles include “starters” and “main courses”. (Wikipedia link)

Which spawned:

The Joy of Gay Sex … a sex manual for men who have sex with men, written by Dr. Charles Silverstein and Edmund White. The book was first published in 1977.

It was followed by The New Joy of Gay Sex, published by Perennial in August 1993, and co-authored by Felice Picano. (Wikipedia link)

Then there were more food books:

Joy of Pickling, Joy of Kosher, Joy of Apples, Joy of Home Brewing, …

and some non-food books, mostly (but not entirely) with nominal gerunds in their titles:

Joy of Running, Joy of Sculling, Joy of Birding, Joy of Juggling, Joy of Bocce, …

Then from The Joy of Sex came the word plays in the webcomic title The Joy of Tech and the website The Joy of Sox for Boston Red Sox fans. And no doubt many more (The Joy of Six, The Joy of Sax, The Joy of Shacks, … ?).

Freshly appearing at a local restaurant, BearBoat wines, from Sonoma. Entertaining name, with its /b/’s. And with cute labels, with this as a template:

(#1)

Particular instances have captions as well as the graphic.

I’ve done alliteration with /b/ before:

“Beer Bust at Blow Buddies” (link)

BOAR BRISTLE (link)

And then there are other entertaining wine names. An old favorite of mine is Bonny Doon‘s Le Cigare Volant:

(#2)

There are sites that collect bizarre and funny wine names, for instance this one, which offers, among other things:

Horse’s Ass, Hey Mambo, Goats do Roam [Côtes du Rhône], Plungerhead, Pinot Evil [See No Evil], Fat Bastard, Toasted Head, Gnarly Head, Arrogant Frog

From Chris Waigl on Facebook, a story from the Anchorage Daily News on the 12th, “State’s sex humor cringe-inducing but might work” by Julia O’Malley:

I will now write about the state’s condom distribution program like a grown-up, without veering into questionable puns or juvenile humor. This is not because I have great  impulse control. It is because the state has generated all the teenage condom humor I can handle today.

… Condom distribution is part of a new public-health campaign entitled “Wrap it up, Alaska.”

The state’s condoms come tucked in red matchbooks. Each matchbook is decorated with an Alaskan image and an edgy sex-related slogan. Picture a hockey goalie above the words, “Nice Save,” a pair of rain boots with “Keep Your Rubbers Handy,” or small plane above the words “Happy Landing.” Those are the cleaner slogans. Some of the others are too explicit and/or cringe-worthy for a family newspaper. (The pictures that accompany those include an oil well, a basketball player with his ball, a snowmachiner without a helmet and a person riding a grizzly. You can use your imagination.)

What does sexual humor have to do with public health? It begins, I was told by the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services this week, with chlamydia.

Alaska has a huge chlamydia problem, and latex condoms are a simple way to prevent its spread. Offering free condoms with humor might help.

From Benita Bendon Campbell, this reminiscence of a moment during her time in Paris with Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, many years ago:

Ann and I and aother friend were having afternoon tea at our local café on the Boulevard Saint Germain. The patron and patronne had just acquired a German shepherd puppy named Rita. In French, a German shephejrd is “un berger allemand.” Our friend remarked that Rita must be “une bergère allemande” — or a Gereman shepherdess. That is funny in French as well as in English. (The correct form is “une femelle berger allemand.” The name of the breed is invariable.)

Bonnie’s sketch of une bergère allemande:

Just as there are two lexical items shepherd in English — one referring to someone who tends sheep, and one in the dog breed name German shepherd — so there are are two lexical items berger in French, differing semantically as in English. Both languages have distinct lexical items for a woman who tends sheep: English shepherdess (related to shepherd), French bergère (related to berger). So the joke works in both languages.

French has the additional complexity that it has grammatical gender, which shows up in grammatical agreement: un berger allemand (ambiguous between the two senses of a German shepherd) but une bergère allemande ’a German shepherdess’, with both the article and and the adjective varying in form according to the grammatical gender of the noun. That makes the joke somewhat broader in French than in English.

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

(Play on mnemonic – demonic.) But can grammarians exorcise possession?

Three mnemonics here: one on spelling, one on the number of days in a month, and then one on the levels of biological classification, from largest to smallest:

kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species

There are a great many KPCOFGS mnemonics starting with

King Philip Came Over

and variously continuing:

For Good/Great Spaghetti/Soup/Steak
For Green Spaghetti
For Grape Soda
For Good Sex
From Great(er) Spain
From Germany Sailing

Yesterday’s Bizarro:

One-word palindromes. Then there are phrasal palindromes: AVID DIVA, and more complex expressions like the playful variant

ANAL WAS I ERE I SAW LANA

in a Bizarro cartoon here.

Offered on the Mental Floss store, this t-shirt:

Ouch. The allusion is to the film Casablanca. From Wikipedia:

Rick’s toast to Ilsa, “Here’s looking at you, kid”, used several times, is not in the draft screenplays, but has been attributed to something Bogart said to Bergman as he taught her poker between takes.

Today’s Zippy, with yet another diner:

(#1)

That’s the Modern Diner in Pawtucket. Then there’s the allusion to the limerick beginning “There once was a man from Nantucket”.

On the diner, from Wikipedia:

Modern Diner is a historic restaurant at 364 East Avenue in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, United States.

Built in 1940, as one of the Sterling Streamliners, the diner was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

(#2)

Then the limerick. From Wikipedia:

“There once was a man from Nantucket” is the opening line for many limericks, in which the name of the island of Nantucket creates obscene rhymes and puns. The protagonist is typically portrayed as a well-endowed, hypersexualized persona.
The line is so well-known that it has been used as a stand-alone joke, implying upcoming obscenities or taboo language.
The earliest published version appeared in 1902 in the Princeton Tiger:

There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

Other publications seized upon the “Nantucket” motif, spawning many sequels. Among the most well known are:

But he followed the pair to Pawtucket,
The man and the girl with the bucket;
And he said to the man,
He was welcome to Nan,
But as for the bucket, Pawtucket.

That gets us to Pawtucket. Then come the ribald versions (going back at least to the 1920s), taking advantage of the Nantucket / fuck it rhyme.

Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine has Pig misunderstanding more expressions — this time a name:

Yo mama (literally ‘your mother’) is of course the beginning of ritual insults, and can stand on its own as a all-purpose insult.

Yo mama and Yo-Yo Ma are both built from the syllables yo and ma, in that order, with one of them doubled. So they are formally very similar.

On Yo-Yo Ma, from Wikipedia:

Yo-Yo Ma (born October 7, 1955) is an American cellist. He was a child prodigy and was performing by age five. He completed a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1976.

Ma is known for the breadth of his tastes in music.

Today’s Bizarro, punning and meta:

Carbon footprint, cartoon footprint. Plus the cartoon references,

Two references, to Mr. Natural and Nancy.

From Wikipedia:

Mr. Natural (Fred Natural) is a comic book character created and drawn by 1960s counterculture and underground comix artist Robert Crumb. The character first appeared in the premiere issue of Yarrowstalks (the May 5, 1967 issue).

[Added 11/13: Bob Richmond points out that the character above is one of Crumb's, but not Mr. Natural (who can be viewed in the posting linked to just below). Instead, it's the Keep on Truckin' Man. Both characters step out with big feet in front.]

Mr. Natural and Nancy appeared together in a posting of mine (from January 11th):

For some time I’ve been meaning to post on the underground comics of the ’70s (and later), but the project grew unwieldy, and I never got around even to the major figure of the period, R. Crumb, the Crumb of the Keep on Truckin’ comics and the characters Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural [illustration in the posting]

… Crumb’s own site is here. The Wikipedia entry labels him as an artist and illustrator, not a cartoonist (there’s that art vs. the comics thing again):

Robert Dennis Crumb (born August 30, 1943) — known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb — is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive [I would say savage] view of the American mainstream.

Then there’s Bushmiller:

Ernest Paul Bushmiller, Jr. (23 August 1905 – 15 August 1982) was an American cartoonist, best known for creating the long-running daily comic strip Nancy. (link)

… For years I took the adventures of Nancy and Sluggo to be symptomatic of what had gone wrong with the daily comics after their golden days: bland, flat, formulaic, and not at all funny. (Many people pick Garfield as the exemplar of the great descent into inanity.) But canny observers, including Bill Griffith [of Zippy the Pinhead], have found much to admire in Nancy.

The posting goes on to give an appreciation of Nancy from comics theorist Scott McCloud (who’s come up on this blog several times).

Today’s Zippy, back on the diner track:

(#1)

The text of the strip veers Zippy-fashion through politics, art (Andrew Wyeth), and pop food (Mallomars), to culminate in an outrageous pun on “I never met a man I didn’t like” (attributed to Will Rogers).

Start with the diner:

The Deluxe Town Diner is an historic diner at 627 Mount Auburn Street in Watertown, Massachusetts.

This diner was manufactured on site, rather than having been prefabricated and shipped to the site from a specific diner manufacturer. In 1947, George Knotos and his father built this diner around their earlier Worcester Lunch Car Company diner. The Worcester diner became the kitchen in the current building. The Town Diner’s two-tone porcelain siding and its round glass-block corners combine architectural features of the Wocester and Paramount Diner manufacturers, respectively.

The diner was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 as “Town Diner”. (Wikipedia link)

(#2)

Background:

Wyeth:

Andrew Newell Wyeth (… July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century.

In his art, Wyeth’s favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine. One of the best-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting, Christina’s World, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. (Wikipedia link)

Mallomars:

Chocolate-coated marshmallow treats are produced in different variations around the world, with several countries claiming to have invented it or hailing it as their “national confection”. The first chocolate-coated marshmallow treat was created in the early 1800s in Denmark.

… In the United States, Mallomars are produced by Nabisco. A graham cracker circle is covered with a puff of extruded marshmallow, then enrobed in dark chocolate, which forms a hard shell. Mallomars were introduced to the public in 1913, the same year as the Moon Pie (a confection which has similar ingredients). The first box of Mallomars was sold in West Hoboken, New Jersey (now Union City, New Jersey).

Mallomars are generally available from early October through to April. They are not distributed during the summer months, supposedly because they melt easily in summer temperatures, though this is as much for marketing reasons as for practical ones. Devoted eaters of the cookie have been known to stock up during winter months and keep them refrigerated over the summer, although Nabisco markets other fudge-coated cookie brands year-round. Eighty-five percent of all Mallomars are sold in the New York metropolitan area. They are produced entirely within Canada, at a factory in Scarborough, Ontario. The issue of Nabisco’s choice to release Mallomars seasonally became a parodied topic on a sketch delivered by graphic artist Pierre Bernard on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. (Wikipedia link)

Today’s Zippy, covering a range of topics:

(#1)

(Note the pun in the title, on zero sum game.) Backgound on the diner guys, from a June 1998 piece “Clearing out the Oasis” by cartoonist Bill Griffith in Roadside Magazine:

It started out innocently enough. I needed detailed photographs of diners. Specifically, I needed photos of the interiors of diners, of people sitting on stools at the counter, eating and talking. A few months back, in my syndicated daily comic strip, “Zippy”, I’d begun a series of strips featuring “Bert ‘n’ Bob”, two seriously committed diner patrons. Bert ‘n‘ Bob love diners. Bert ‘n’ Bob live diners. Bert ‘n’ Bob are diners. Zippy himself makes an occasional appearance in these strips, but more often it’s Bert ‘n’ Bob on their own, ruminating on life over coffee, rice pudding and the Daily Special. The diner books in my reference library contained mostly exterior shots; interior scenes were rare. My models for Bert ‘n’ Bob came from a single photo I took in Collins Diner in Canaan, Connecticut, on a trip in July, 1997 (great lemon meringue pie). They’re seen in a three-quarter rear view, a pose by now quite familiar to my readers. Though I was enjoying the repetitive, eerily existential quality of that one view, I finally grew weary of it. And, thus, I found myself in the Oasis Diner in White Plains, New York, early in February.

(#2)

Griffiths’ taking photos of the people in the diner then clears the place out.

The rhyming name was inevitable, but today’s Zippy takes a strange turn with it:

Macho Nacos: flame retardant, Liquid Paper, Bondo [putty], and Glue Stik. In the real world, Macho Nachos are more appetizing.

You can find a number of recipes on the net. Paula Deen’s involves the following ingredients:

1 can refried beans
1 large bag white corn tortilla chips
1 medium onion, chopped
1 cup shredded pepper jack
1 jalapeno, sliced crosswise, plus extra for garnish
1 can chili, or your favorite chili recipe
1 cup shredded cheddar
1 cup sour cream
1 cup green onion, chopped
1 tomato, diced

In recent advertising news: from Adweek on the 11th, “Charmin Thinks Twice About Its ‘Asgard’ Joke, Even Though Twitter Loved It: Gone but not forgotten” by David Gianatasio:

(Hat tip to Victor Steinbok.)

First, Charmin cracks the Internet up with its potty humor. Then it wipes its Twitter clean.

On Friday, the toilet-paper brand squeezed out a triumphant movie-related pun—”We’ve always been an #Asgardian”—along with the image of a cartoon bear wearing a winged-helmet and brandishing TP as though it were Thor’s hammer. The titular character of Thor: The Dark World, which opened in theaters that very day, hails from Asgard, and Asgard sounds like “ass guard,” so most commenters were bowled over by the pithy poop-culture tie-in. However, the tweet was, alas, quickly and mysteriously flushed from the system. Does that make sense when the brand was so clearly on a roll? Well, the tweet’s disappearance keeps the story from stalling, so it just might be an example of brilliant marketing strategy we can all get behind.

The full story has even more toilet language play. It gets old very fast.

Yesterday’s Pearls Before Swine:

A piling-up of expressions in red, hard to parse — a word avalanche, one of the specialties of this strip. Most recently on this blog here, with a reference back to this posting.

The Christmas holidays approach, and we get all sorts of word plays on seasonal themes. Here are three decidedly gay ones.

1. Jingle Balls. From several sources on the net, this entertaining Show Your Joe ad, for Joe Boxer briefs:

Jingle Balls  (#1)

2. Deck the Halls. From the GayPosters site:

(#2)

3. Jizz the Season. My favorite, if only because every year John McIntyre warns editors against using the worn “tis the season” formula in their Christmas stories. This is from the Channel 1 Releasing site:

(#3)

An ad for sex toys, featuring Rascal man Johnny Hazzard.

4. Bonus. And then there’s the song “Jizz the Season”, from the album A Very Sticky Christmas … and More, by Sticky Liquid Experiment, available from Amazon.

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:

A pun on the word medium: an adjective, lying between cool and hot; or a noun: from NOAD2:

a person claiming to be in contact with the spirits of the dead and to communicate between the dead and the living.