I Must Have More Thoughts Than This

Below are images from a book — Spencer had access to it and I don’t know its name — of a troupe of young humorists illustrating various funnyfaces and the charades-style meanings behind them. The pictures are quite old — around the time America was still developing a sense of humor, really — so the young hopefuls in them are likely dead, cancerous, divorced and sad now. I thought some of the explanations behind the faces were a little to on-the-spot and have consequently supplied my own interpretations.

Left: “My father didn’t love me enough and now look what I can do for money!” Right: “I hide my deviant sexuality with ugly faces, but you can still tell from my pinkie ring.”

Left: “My father didn’t love me enough and now look what I can do for money!” Right: “This is more or less where the drugs go in. Oh! I should have been a doctor!”

Left: “This is what Pete looked like when I pulled him out from the car.” Right: “I am horrifically racist.”

Your own interpretations are most welcome.

Pancakes and Pussycats

Four thoughts had while eating pancakes and watching Josie and the Pussycats on Boomerang:


One: Given that the show is made for children, the quality of the music is surprisingly high. Not that I’d want a Jose and the Pussycats album or anything, but I’ll gladly admit that the obligatory chase music is not usually terrible, especially in light of what pop music was in the early 70s. To see for yourself, watch this clip in which the gang flees militant Muslims:

Two: Perhaps because the show offered sugar-addled children the first-ever black regular on a Saturday morning cartoon in the form of the plucky yet level-headed Valerie Brown, the producers apparently decided to make the other Pussycat, Melody Jones, the dumbest piece of shit ever. Literally, she is too dumbness to be alive. Even for a kid’s show, her stupidity is insulting. Melody is well into her late teen years on the show, and, I swear, by this point in her life she should realistically have either eaten battery acid because she thought it was milkshakes or been murdered by anyone who’s ever heard her talk.

Three: On grounds that she is unfailingly unpleasant and actually cattier than the three girls who are dressed like cats, I am tempted claim that there is no reason for bitchy Alexandra Cabot to hang out with the rest of the gang. She is not part of the band. She does nothing but make life worse for everyone around her. And she is unlikable: When provoked, Alexandra is downright awful, but she’s also often spiteful for no reason. But then I realize that the rest of the characters probably truly don’t like her — how could they? — and that the reason they keep her around in hopes that Melody will demonstrate her dim-wittedness in such a way that infuriates Alexandra to the point that Alexandra will murder Melody.

Four: The two male characters blow, if only because they’re so clearly derivative of the male from Scooby-Doo. Alan is a hunkier, more assuredly heterosexual version of Freddie, while Alexander is a snobbier, high-strung version of Shaggy that could probably benefit from smoking a scoobie-doobie. And it doesn’t help that Casey Kasem voiced both Alexander and Shaggy and does so almost identically.

For the sake of pop culture continuity, I’ll mention that 2001 live action movie version of Josie and the Pussycats cast Rosario Dawson as Valerie, Tara Reid as Melody and Missi Pyle as Alexandra. So even if the movie was an abysmal failure, it at least had spot-on casting.

Bubbling, Doubling, Taco Sauce

The following is something I’d realistically be better off not sharing with the world but I am compelled to publish online anyway.


Shakespare’s Macbeth finds an archrival in the form of Macduff, and it’s likely no coincidence that the two have very similar names. They’re actually similar people, in some ways, but with significant differences. In modern texts — and perhaps in older ones as well, depending on how the transcriber decided he wanted to spell — this relationship is underscored by the fact the lowercase “b” in Macbeth’s name looks exactly like a flipped-around lowercase “d,” as you see in Macduff’s name.

That all being said, can the same opposite-rival-“b”-and-“d” relationship be applied Taco Bell and Del Taco?

Leftover Morpheme Sauce

This one seemed appropriate this week, given what’s likely hiding in your tupperwear as I write this.

Also, we’re on the letter “C.” So there.

cranberry morphere (pronounced exactly like you think it would be) — noun: a morpheme within a complex word whose meaning is opaque to the present speakers of the language.

Fascinating, right? And perfectly clear?

This bit of grammatical formalese might not mean much to anyone, but this is nonetheless a cool concept. Allow me to illustrate by example.

In the word cranberry, the word part cran is a cranberry morpheme, also known as a fossilized term. This particular chunk doesn’t mean anything on its own, but its presence in the word cranberry has meaning nonetheless: it helps differentiate a cranberry from some other kind of berry. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the cran part comes from the low German Kraan, meaning “crane,” but that historical meaning has become completely lost despite the persistence of the word part in the name of the fruit.

It’s this disparity that lent the concept its name.

A small aside: Cranberry might be a bad example to use in explaining this concept. The association that the cran part has with the fruit itself has lent it a new meaning even when it appears separately from the berry. Look at any Ocean Spray bottle and observe that cran by itself signifies the presence of cranberries — or at least cranberry concentrate or cranberry-flavored sugar water. Cran-Grape is cranberry-grape, Cran-Orange is cranberry-orange, and Cran-Mango is cranberry-mango despite the fact that marketers missed out on the phenomenal opportunity to trandemark the name “Crango.” (As the blog Semantic Compositions notes, it helps to be fluent in the offshoot of English known as Marketing.)

Unfortunately, most explanations of the concept of cranberry morphemes begin with the history of the word cranberry and then springboard into other examples that also happen to be berries. Like gooseberry. It has no real connection with geese, and its current form is hypothesized to be a corruption of the French groseille, which refers to various types of currants. (Randomly, it also can be used “an additional person” in the sense that we sometimes say “a third wheel.”) And the rasp in raspberry used to be rapsis, possibly from raspise, “a sweet rose-colored wine.” (Also of interest: Etymologists say the raspberry in the sense of the the disapproving noise you make with your mouth comes from Cockney-style rhyming slang — “raspberry tart” with “fart.” News to me.)

These examples have doubtlessly fooled at least one person into thinking that cranberry morphemes only exist in the names of fruit, but that’s not the case. Other examples include the cob in cobweb (it means spider), the twi in twilight (it means both “two” and “half,” oddly, but I think it means the latter here), and the luke in lukewarm (it means “tepid”).

So take away from this, if nothing else: Cranberries may be just slightly more complicated than you would have thought otherwise.

But only a little more.

I mean, they’re still just cranberries.

• barrack
  
• ambeer
  
• zenzizenzizenzic
• ypsiliform
• xenodocheionology
• witzelsucht
  
• veneficial
  
• ucalegon
  
• toby
  
• tiffin
  
• shebang
  
• roynish
  
• qualtagh
  
• quacksalver
  
• pismire
• orf
  
• nobiliary particle
  
• mongo
  
• lemniscate
  
• longicorn
  
• kakopygian
  
• jehu
• itaiitai
• grandgore
• fissilingual

Regresso

Since I’m for the moment situated on the grounds upon which I and at least several others are said to have spent our youth stomping — on what, exactly, I have no idea — I figured I’d celebrate the occasion with some Hollister-specific nostalgia.

Ta da. The above scanned postcard depicts a restaurant that has never in my life looked this way. I actually have no idea when or how this postcard would have come into my possession since it would seem to precede my existence as a human being. Of course, there’s a good chance that Progresso’s simply had old postcards sitting around long after the restaurant itself no longer matched what the postcards themselves promised.

That would happen at Progresso’s, a restaurant that most in Hollister probably don’t consider a nice place to eat, per se, but more of a place that they just eat at — maybe more out of habit than anything else. I’ve been told that the place became popular as a result of its cheese enchiladas being one of the few Vatican-approved Friday night dinner plates in town.

In my opinions, the back of the postcard is even better: both of the fonts, the blue ink, the way the full name of the establishment appears in a frowny arc, the fact that the postcards were apparently printed in Dallas, everything. The whole of it speaks to a different time and a different aesthetic that just works for me.

Circle for Cry?

I am watching Pushing Daisies and trying to wrap my head around the supposed Latin phrase orbis pro vox. Should this sound familiar? Should it be anything? Google is little help and Idiot Robot Translations puts the phrase into English as “circle for cry.” My high school-and-a-little-bit-of-college Latin is way rusty, however. Orbis can be other rounds things, If I remember correctly: a ring, an orb, a globe, maybe? Maybe the globe? The not-so-small world? Vox is usually “voice,” but can also the metaphorical use of “voice,” like a voice in government or an electoral voice.

Also: I’m apparently not the only one who’s curious about this.

Also also: That was Crystal from Dead Like Me eating at The Pie Hole, right?

Action County USA

So remember earlier in the month, when I blogged, if ever so tersely, about the fact that my city was on fire? Well, they put the fire out. Now we’re flooding. In fact, some of the same people who had to flee the Tea Fire and would have only recently returned to their homes are now evacuating again to escape mud and flood. In another post, I concluded with this thought: “It truly does seem that if it is not one thing then it must be another.” This would seem to be the case.

On a lighter note, area officials sent out a map of Santa Barbara this evening, with the mandatory evacuation area colored purple and, colored yellow, the areas that may yet be evacuated tonight. Unfortunately, the shape of the flood-endangered Sycamore Canyon lends the purple shape a certain penile protrusion into the Eastside. That little pointer, combined with the yellow fluid spilling out from the tip and all the way down to the 101, looks more than a little like male member pissing all over Santa Barbara.

Which would be appropriate.

see the flood penis in greater detail by clicking here.

A correction, I guess: If it’s not one thing then it must be another — and then again it might also be a penis.