Penguins – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Penguins’ Category
USPS penguin day of the past
April 15, 2026
On 4/10/26 my USPS mail included a postcard showing penguins at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, with brief messages from three different people, each signed with a first name. So as not to get these people embroiled in this discussion, I’ll use their initials: E (common male name), I (uncommon female name), M (common male name). E’s message provided some crucial contextual information:
Ahoy, Arnold! Saw these really cute guys at the aquarium and thought of you.
I’s and M’s messages were about the penguins’ behavior they observed at the Shedd. E and M I couldn’t identify, but I’s name usefully picked out the only person I have ever known with this name, so I was able to send her e-mail about the card, which turned out to be deeply baffling.
Posted in Mistakes, Penguins, Weirdness | 2 Comments »
Penguins, iconic and indistinguishable
March 17, 2026
On the heels of my 3/14 posting “Seeking a penguin caption” (in which the birds are ubiquitous), there come two penguin cartoons in the April 2026 issue of Funny Times: one by Bill DeMain in which the birds are iconic, one by Vaughan Tomlinson in which they are (memically) indistinguishable.
Posted in Books, Cartoonists, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Logos, Penguins, Signs and symbols, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
Seeking a penguin caption
March 14, 2026
The New Yorker cartoon caption contest in the 3/6/25 issue features one of my totem animals, the penguin. Well, quite a lot of penguins:
The three finalists for the caption will be announced in the 3/30 issue
The caption — what the woman is saying to the man — could be about that pigeon (maybe the whole thing is stage-managed by the pigeon; or maybe it’s about a pigeon among the penguins, like a cat among the pigeons). Meanwhile, note the prevalence of penguins — driving a car, in the windows of a building, on top of the food truck; they’re everywhere.
Posted in Captions, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | 5 Comments »
Penguin games
November 28, 2025
Briefly noted. In the latest New Yorker issue (of 12/1/25), cartoonist Meredith Southland suggests a solution to the puzzle of what penguins are doing when they waddle around waving their wings in the air:
(#1) They are playing Charades! Well, life on the ice floes of Antarctic imagination offers few interesting diversions, but this communal game can occupy plenty of dark cold time
The all-time favorite penguin game, however, is Hide and Seek, a spheniscid take-off on Where’s Waldo? Sometimes known as Lost in the Crowd. Though ice-sliding and egg-rolling races are both tremendously popular. Never a dull South Polar moment.
Posted in Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins, Toys and games | 2 Comments »
Sloths, penguins, and Buddhist joy
September 6, 2025
Birthday greetings: Slothful Salsa, the Penguins of Penzance, and zuiki.
“Slothful Salsa”: the title of a Jacquie Lawson animated ecard, from R&T (Rod Williams and Ted Bush), celebrating my birthday with a delightful salsa-style performance of “Happy Birthday” by a band of jungle animals under the direction of a drummer sloth. At the conclusion, going from the snake on bass to the leopard on guitar:
(#1) All together now! — a slothful salsa led by a salsic sloth; not many sloths are into salsa music, though there are reports of sloths enamored of the spicy sauce, which they consume with ponderous dignity, giving out little whimpers of pleasure (sloths don’t move fast, but they’re very earnest)
From NOAD:
noun salsa: 1 [a] a type of Latin American dance music incorporating elements of jazz and rock. [b] a dance performed to salsa music. 2 (especially in Latin American cooking) a spicy tomato sauce: a flour tortilla with salsa and shredded cheese. ORIGIN Spanish, literally ‘sauce’, extended in American Spanish to denote the dance.
“The Penguins of Penzance”: this wonderful artwork by Opal Armstrong Zwicky, made specifically as a birthday present for me:
(#2) G&S, The Pirates of Penzance — complete, presumably, with the leap birthday and the pilot / pirate confusion — but done with penguins (my original totem animal)
Opal was introduced to Pirates as a child, by her mother and me, and it took. So in addition to the familial Savoyardism, Opal is also an accomplished artist, with a wry sense of humor, and appreciates my attachment to penguins.
Buddhist deep joy. Finally, from Larry Schourup (a loving friend of 55 years now, living for many years in Japan), an e-mail with a birthday sentiment that just bowled me over:
The other day, while listening to a talk in Japanese, an unfamiliar Buddhist term caught my ear. Afterward, when I looked it up, I realized I’d found the perfect way to express how I feel about your momentous 85th. The term, which means “a feeling of deep joy and gratitude for another person’s virtues” is zuiki.
Zuiki is (one version of) my name in Chinese. So for a moment I thought Larry had fabricated the whole wonderful business. But no, it’s all just as he said, and it’s deeply moving.
Bonus. All done in public, on Facebook. Starting with an astonishing encomium from my step-son Kit Transue (my man Jacques Transue’s son), to friends on FB:
— KT: Happy birthday, Arnold Zwicky! (Arnold is one of my two step-dads: he was my father’s partner through my father’s brain cancer, treatment, and subsequent early onset Alzheimer’s. Throughout the course of those challenges, he remained a source of unlimited love and gave my father unimaginable company and support.) Thank you for being true, for being loving, for being open, and for being loud*!
(*I’m no longer surprised by friends who know Arnold from his USENET posts; he now blogs [on WordPress here])
— AZ > KT: Wow. No, I’m not going to dispute that amazing encomium, beyond saying that in all those matters I’ve been doing what I thought I needed to do (not placing any burden on anyone else, also reminding people that I’m a real person, someone who makes mistakes, is often negligent, and sometimes screws things up badly). But yes, I did those good things. I’d just like to emphasize that there was a wonderful time before the first disastrous time, and a long deeply satisfying time with Jacques in between the two disastrous times. I’ve written a fair amount about J’s view of himself as my support staff and my protector (as well as my best friend and my lover and a second son for my dad) and about the pleasures and challenges of life together. He was a good man, the love of my life, still poignantly missed. It’s especially moving that you praise me in just the way your father did; being open (and highly visible) and being loud were not his ways, but he applauded my performances and the good that might come of them.
Life stories. Nothing really could follow the birthday wishes from Larry and Kit. But I also got birthday e-mail from X, who noted that we’d been friends for 51 years. (Larry goes back to Columbus OH, 55 years ago; Benita Bendon Campbell — a friend from Princeton, 66 years ago — survives, with her considerable wits intact; but surely the time-depth award for Surviving Friends of Arnold goes to Bill Richardson, whose friendship goes back to summer boys’ camp when we were but 10, fully 75 years ago.) I cast my mind back to the occasion when X and I met, what their previous life and mine had been like, and how our two lives, separately, then followed extraordinarily complex, and frankly unlikely, paths. And wrote them:
Would anyone believe your life story? Or mine? Bits of it, sure, but the whole thing, in sequence, I doubt it.
X then helpfully pulled out some of the more extraordinary recent turns in their life, which I agreed no one could have predicted, or maybe even imagined possible.
Posted in Animation, Art, Dance, Events and occasions, Friendship, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language and food, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Penguins | 1 Comment »
Events of the day
August 30, 2025
🪛🔧🔨 penultimate August and (US) Labor Saturday; looking ahead, I see that Labor Day in 1940 was 9/2, but I wasn’t born until 9/6, so that was a long labor; meanwhile, from Benita Bendon Campbell today, an early birthday greeting to me:
The mammoth, the orchid, and the penguin, the emblems of my land, a BBC confection celebrating (as Bonnie observed) a friendship going back about 66 years
Meanwhile, these are birthday days for survivors from those days: Ellen Sulkis James (also going back ca. 66 years, to the Reading Eagle newspaper), who is 85 today; BBC (from Princeton), who is 89 tomorrow; and then, eventually, me.
Posted in Events and occasions, Holidays, Language and plants, Mammoths, Mascots, My life, Penguins | Leave a Comment »
The rainbow made us gay, the penguins say
August 26, 2025
From Steven Levine on 8/19, this image from a Facebook group on thrift store finds, about a rectangle of needlepoint (probably intended to be a wall hanging) depicting penguins marching from left to right, through a rainbow, each emerging from the other side with its body, inside and out, in one of the colors of the gay pride flag; the rainbow makes them gay:
(#1) Steven of course thought of me, but appreciated that this would not be the time to be giving me penguiniana, so contented himself with letting me enjoy the strange spectacle
I’d never seen anything quite like it. Marching penguins, yes, of course. Penguins in the colors of the gay pride flag, of course. I’ve posted both. But the preposterous fantasy of penguins getting gay-transmuted by passing through a rainbow, absolutely not. And then to realize it not in drawing, painting, or trick photography, but in the unpretentious craft medium of needlepoint, where we expect earnest images (stylized birds) and slogans (BLESS THIS HOME), well, that’s wonderfully goofy.
Posted in Art, Color, Furnishings and tools, Gender and sexuality, Penguins, Rainbow, Rainbows | Leave a Comment »
Penguin-oriented art
August 20, 2025
From my 8/13 posting “Botanical linocuts”, about some artworks
that I hadn’t previously posted about, so this is my chance to record them before they go away [in the Great Dispossession].
Some are penguin-oriented. On 8/11, I posted “i just gotta be me”, about a penguin photo montage by Steve Raymer. Still to come (when I get good photos of them) are works by two wildly dissimilar painters: the California surrealist Cliff McReynolds and the Oregon artist Ann Munson, loving enthusiast of the Oregon landscape, garden art, and creatures, both domestic and exotic. Today I bring you Henry Evans, a printmaker — a linocut artist, to be specific — devoted entirely to botanical subjects.
And today I bring you McReynolds and Munson, with two very different approaches to penguins from the Pacific coast (with thanks to Robert Emery Smith, for supplying photographs of works not available on-line).
Posted in Academic life, Art, Language and animals, Language and plants, My life, Penguins | Leave a Comment »
Botanical linocuts
August 13, 2025
First, apologies for losing a day. I fell victim to some sudden and overwhelming intestinal affliction that I would prefer not to describe here — it’s profoundly disgusting — a disaster that took me an entire day to do basic cleanup on, and then took most of my helper’s day yesterday to do a proper cleansing. Resilient AZ then kicked in, so by 4 yesterday afternoon I was back into the business of dispossession, mostly on office supplies (the house I am in has three fully working desks, each overstuffed with its own contents, oh Jesus), but now some tackling of framed artworks. Which brought me to works that I hadn’t previously posted about, so this is my chance to record them before they go away.
Some are penguin-oriented. On 8/11, I posted “i just gotta be me”, about a penguin photo montage by Steve Raymer. Still to come (when I get good photos of them) are works by two wildly dissimilar painters: the California surrealist Cliff McReynolds and the Oregon artist Ann Munson, loving enthusiast of the Oregon landscape, garden art, and creatures, both domestic and exotic. Today I bring you Henry Evans, a printmaker — a linocut artist, to be specific — devoted entirely to botanical subjects. Someone Jacques and I discovered many years ago, in a long-gone science and art store in Stanford Shopping Center. Where we bought, and then had framed, two elegant one-color linocuts of herbs, “Sage” (1984) and “Worm Wood” (1985).
Posted in Art, Language and plants, My life, Penguins | Leave a Comment »
i just gotta be me
August 11, 2025
This is stage 3 in the history of pop-cultural affirmations of individuality; it came to me in a framed version of the photo below, an image that’s graced a wall close to my worktable for many years, but has now come down in the great project of dispossession, as I undo the contents of my condo, which was once a kind of gigantic museum of visual delights of all sorts, covering almost every vertical surface, also filling shelves and crowding other horizontal surfaces (on a variety of themes, of which my family and my life, penguins, mammoths, penises, attractive male bodies, cartoons, and collages (many of them both antic and homoerotic) were especially prominent), with an accompanying library of books of equally varied delight:
(#1) It turns out (as I discovered by turning the sheet over) that this was a page in a calendar (presumably from Raymer’s employer, the National Geographical Society, which went on to use it in a line of t-shirts, still selling well); in any case, some 20 or 30 years ago, Raymer put together some of his photos of rockhopper penguins and added the defiant caption i just gotta be me (a sentiment with a history, which I’m about to sketch)
Posted in Art, Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life, Penguins, Photography, Quotations, Titles | 2 Comments »