Zippy and Hi and Lois

[Zippy, February 18, 2013.]

Bill Griffith’s affection for Bil Keane’s The Family Circus is well known. Since the residents of Dingburg’s “humorless enclave” recoil in horror from that strip, it would seem that Griffith must like Hi and Lois too.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)
“Bushmiller Country”
Hommage à Ernie Bushmiller
Landscape with some rocks
Nancy + Sluggo = Perfection
Zippy and Bukowski

Word of the evening: flip

Another bit of language from tonight’s Downton Abbey: Mrs. Patmore spoke of how her suitor, Mr. Tufton, was only interested in her for her cooking. He would go on and on, she said, about how he liked his pancakes flipped. No double entendres here: Mrs. Patmore was speaking literally.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces pancake back to approximately 1400. But this use of flip is a fairly new arrival:

trans. orig. and chiefly U.S. To cook by turning over on a hotplate, grill, or griddle, esp. as a job in a fast-food restaurant. Chiefly in to flip burgers.

The OED’s first citation is from the Chicago Tribune, January 21, 1913: “Unknown celebrities . . . The artist with a heart tattooed on his arm, who flips flapjacks in the window of Childs’ restaurant.”

As with last week’s stuff, American English leads the way.

Other Downton Abbey words
Hobbledehoy
Stuff

Separated at birth?

 
[Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls.]

I hadn’t planned to make two such posts in one day. Elaine and I thought that had to be Harriet Sansom Harris (Frasier Crane’s crafty agent Bebe Glazer on Frasier) playing Susan MacClare, Marchioness of Flintshire, in tonight’s Downton Abbey. But no.

Tonight’s show was a Christmas Special. Some Special. I have come to think of Julian Fellowes’s screenplays as bowling balls. The characters are the pins.

Related posts
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Steve Buscemi and John Davis Chandler
Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt
Ted Cruz and Joseph McCarthy
Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov
Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks

[Have these women met? And would they see a resemblance?]

Separated at birth?

 
[Senators Joseph McCarthy and Ted Cruz.]

The resemblance of junior senator to junior senator is more than rhetorical. It’s the curling lower lip that does it.

*

February 22: The New Yorker reports on Cruz’s claim that when he was a student at Harvard Law School, twelve Harvard law professors believed, in Cruz’s words, “in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”

Related posts
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Steve Buscemi and John Davis Chandler
Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt
Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov
Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks

A heads-up about comments

I’ve noticed lately that many readers are leaving two or three versions of a comment. The second and third tries don’t seem to be matters of rethinking things: rather, they suggest that the commenter is uncertain about whether a comment has gone through, or stuck, or whatever the appropriate metaphor might be.

I moderate comments to keep spam and other kinds of unpleasantness from appearing on my blog, which means that comments don’t appear immediately. Not long ago, I added a paragraph to my minimalist comment policy (you see it when you click on a link for comments):

Notice the (easy-to-miss) text that appears at the top of the page after you leave a comment: “Your comment has been saved and will be visible after blog owner approval.” Comments don’t disappear; there’s no need to repost them.

I suppose that this paragraph, like Blogger’s message, is also easily missed.

Reader, keep the comments coming, please. But you can save yourself some tedium if you remember: once is enough.

Minimal talking

Strange to attend a concert and be exhorted from the stage to “keep your talking to a minimum.” I was prepared to sit and listen and not talk at all. Which I did anyway.

A few notes

From a page I made to accompany Marianne Moore’s poem “The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing.” I hope you agree that this paragraph is more fun than an anthology’s footnotes.

Other Marianne Moore posts
Marianne Moore magic
Q and A

[Nothing is certain but death and parataxis.]

Recently updated

C+ lawsuit continues It’s over.

Saving the post office Now with a link to a Washington Post piece on social media and the mail.

Saving the post office

“If they don’t find a way to make the postal system more essential to people’s lives, there is only one direction this thing can go”: Tucker Nichols explains why he is campaigning to save the post office.

*

February 15: From the Washington Post: Will social media help save the Postal Service and Saturday delivery?

C+ lawsuit continues

Says the judge, “I remain unconvinced the judiciary should be injecting itself in the academic process.” But the case goes on.

*

February 15: It’s over.

A related post
Suing in academia