[In the constant upheavals of my life and the world around me, I’m now just picking random stuff to post about, from the 60 or 70 items in my ever-expanding queue — whatever catches my fancy at the moment. Don’t try to make sense of it as a whole.]
Jim Horwitz’s Watson cartoon for 4/9 (it came to me on Facebook, which has its own peculiar ways of delivering postings, today, 4/13):
Ingeniously outrageous: Batman and Robin turned into food containers
The two containers have different virtues in the joke: ramen (noodle soup) is a real food item, while bat can is phonologically very close to bat man /´bæt`kæn/ for /´bæt`mæn/.
But, on the minus side, a bat can (a food can with a bat outline printed on it) is a sheer invention (no food that I know of is marketed this way, though the compound bat can is interpretable); while ramen and Robin are more distant phonologically (prosodically different, and segmentally different at two points). To my ear, these differences make the joke that much better, but your tastes might be different from mine.
Meanwhile, I speculate about what kind of thing might be inside that can. Well-hung meat? Chicken wings? Resting miniature vampires?