Two cartoons this morning that hark back to familiar topics on this blog — A Zippy with barbats and a Mother Goose and Grimm with sporks:
(#1)
(#2)
Poindexter barbats — a recurrent theme in Zippy — were covered pretty thoroughly in my posting “The Dingburger bar bat or barbat” of 12/31/12. Barbat is presumably a N-N compound, but the object’s connection to bars and bats is not at all clear (even, apparently, to Zippy, despite the fact that the manufacture of barbats is a major industry in Dingburg and the fact that Zippy has a collection of them); we never see one of them depicted in the strip.
As for sporks, they come up when portmanteaus are mentioned on this blog (spork is a portmanteau word, referring to a combination object), notably in a posting “Spork” of 12/9/09 that features a Bizarro cartoon involving a spork-billed platypus. In #2, we are invited to muse on what the relationship was between the dish and the spoon in the Mother Goose rhyme. The dish ran away with the spoon, suggesting a romantic relationship.
But now the fickle dish has abandoned the spoon and run off with a spork. Are sporks better than spoons because they’re more versatile? Not in the real world, they’re not, but who knows how these things work in the world of utensil relationships.
