How do these respective two-word titles work with their panels? What do they even mean?
I had better luck with the first one after recalling the artist’s first name — but then there is the question of whether I’m mispronouncing something, because the phonetic joke isn’t working for me as it stands.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I think that you have the right answer to the “Magritte” one. To my mind, the two words do more-or-less rhyme; I believe that they have different accented syllables though.
Would the second one just mean the dog’s first visit to the seaside in Gloucester, Massachusetts?
Google searches for “how to pronounce…” for both René Magritte and penne show that in British English the words are pronounced identically (apart from the first letter).
It gives a subtle difference in American English. I think – it’s hard to be sure, as if it is there it’s very subtle, the first syllable of “René” might be slightly shorter than that of “penne”, and the second one might carry slightly more emphasis, but there’s nowhere near enough difference for the joke not to work.
But then having seen discussions here in the past about the significant regional variations in the USA, I wonder which version Google is giving?
If you want two matching “click to listen” results it seems you have to use these
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+pronounce+rene+magritte
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+pronounce+penne
For some reason ‘rene’ without ‘magritte’ doesn’t work nor does ‘rené’ with or without it. They all get results (as do other search engines), but not directly comparable ones.
“PEHN-nay” and “ruh-NAY” do not rhyme in my book. Rhymes demand similar stress in addition to similar sounds.
“PEHN-nay” and “ruh-NAY” do not rhyme in my book.
To throw in another twist, I knew a guy named René, of French Canadian background but living in the U.S. long term. He would sometimes go ahead and pronounce his name “ruh-NAY” (as Powers helpfully writes it), or sometimes with a back rolling French R initially, as he had grown up with. But he was convinced that Americans would take that pronunciation to be exclusively the predominately female name Renée (just walk away), and when he went into business for himself started pronouncing it Renny (“REHN-ee”), and eventually writing it that way too.
I was interested to learn the British pronunciation of the more general term pasta, IPA / ˈpæstə / . (Where American would be ˈpɑ stə, differing just in the first vowel.) I had a plastic container thing meant for cooking spaghetti in a microwave, in brand name Fasta Pasta. I thought that spelling was just peculiar, until one day putting it together and realizing that, as a British product, the name would be kinda fun and clever.
I’ve always pronounced it as puh-NAY, so the rhyme worked easily for me.
Yeah, Penne Magritte was easy. Still dunno what First Gloucester is supposed to mean.
OK, for some people, including Wayno and/or Piraro apparently, René and Penne sound the same, so that’s dealt with, but let’s not get distracted: what pronunciation of Gloucester yields any sense? First Glau-ster, Glue-ster, Glau-chest-er, Glue-tche-ser, Glaust-e-shire?
“Ce n’est pas des pâtes” René Magritte
Comments on https://www.gocomics.com/bliss/2024/05/06 suggest (not terribly convincingly) that it’s the dog’s first visit to Gloucester and thus the dog is getting advice.
#8 Gloucester Gloucester Mass. is by the locals pronounced Gla sta(kind of Bostonish)
I’m goin up to Gla sta for a week. Gonna have some lobsta rolls some soder and a grinder.
Well, okay, so it’s the dog’s first visit. Why is that captioned “First Gloucester” and not “First Visit to Gloucester”? Is the caption supposed to be a joke or just context? And if it’s just context, what’s the joke?
Mitch4 – amusingly, I changed my pronunciation of “faster” to rhyme with “pasta” American style, for that product.
No idea on the dog. I was thinking there might have been a battle at Gloucester (one or another Gloucester)…but not that I can find with a quick Google.
Total agreement with Powers (3) and Mitch4 (5). I’ve always hear Americans pronounce that kind of pasta exactly like “penny.”
And I got a good chuckle from Raymond A. Levesque (11), but not at the Bliss cartoon itself. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Earl of Gloucester is depicted as a foolish old man, but that doesn’t help me with the Bliss.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gloucester lists six events, none of which seem to help.
We have a local TV news person named Rene Knott (no accent as far as I can tell). He goes by “Renny”.
In the first one I also noted that one of the secret symbols was the pipe (or is it?)
My uncle David Waller played the Earl of Gloucester in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear (1982-83); Michael “Dumbledore” Gambon was Lear, and future Borg Queen Alice Krige was one of the daughters.
https://theatricalia.com/play/y/king-lear/production/1sp
My uncle got tied to a chair and Pete Postlethwaite (Usual Suspects) plucked out his eyes and Jenny Agutter (Railway Children, Logan’s Run, Walkabout) crushed them underfoot. It was quite brutal and behind me (when I saw it in the Barbican theatre in London) someone said “Ooh, I don’t think that was quite necessary”.
However, I have no insight into the dog cartoon. I even tried going through the alphabet on the Penne-Rene model (which to my British way of speaking is pretty rhymey) – Aoster, Boster, Coster, Doster etc – but that didn’t generate any ideas.
But it must be a pun on something, and perhaps something less about the dog per se or the location than the nagging, micro-managing solicitous safety-conscious instructions from the man.
I thought Penne Magritte (or similar) was going to be a dish of European origin, but apparently not, as a quick Google search yielded only results relating to the comic itself amid references to Magritte the artist.
A penne saved is a penne earned…
(Off-topic / personal note)
It likely was in part under the influence of narmitaj’s Gravatar profile pic that I assembled this somewhat similar four-square layout. I had in mind asking friends or family whether I should take these gents as models for how to wear longish white hair. (In the end, I’m sticking with a short sort-of-Caesar cut, but letting the beard fill in and get a little bushy.) Two of these guys are named Steven but I would have to check whether either might actually be a Stephen.
Beside the pun on the artist’s first name, the comic is a direct reference to one of Magritte’s best known paintings: Golconda:
P.S. The problem I have with the comic is the critic’s dialog: the whole point of the original work is that the men are not “falling” (and certainly not “raining”, as some idiot Wikipedian has suggested). They are just “there”. The comic would have worked better if the dialog balloon were not there.
P.P.S. I agree with Raymond @9 and Brian @15 that Wayno’s inclusion of the pipe was a clever (if obligatory) addition, as was the bowler hat on the space alien.
My gravatar, if anyone is interested, is a set of photos from a 48-hr period in August 2020. I was already quite hairy and overdue a haircut when the pandemic started, and then grew a beard too. It was eight months before I got to a barber.
I got the haircut before going my aunt’s (socially-distanced) funeral; she was widow of actor David and got to 97 (he only made it to 77). In retrospect I should have remained hirsute, as it better reflected his stage look some of the time. Pics of him with Gambon (bottom) in Lear, and with that other fantasy film wizard Ian “Gandalf” McKellen (top), where he was Friar Lawrence to McK’s Romeo in a 1976 RSC production of Romeo and Juliet.
I’ve met hardly any famous actors myself, but my degrees-of-separation score is pretty good through my uncle; he was also on stage with Peter O’Toole, Ben Kingsley, Peggy Ashcroft and Patrick Stewart among loads of others… Never a particular star, he was stalwart of the RSC from its founding in 1961 for more than 20 years.
Thanks for the notes.
I am often befuddled when IMDB or X-ray will identify an actor or actress as “known for” something or other that is not at all what I know them from. I was bowled over by Gambon in “The Singing Detective” but barely know what fictional universe the name “Dumbledore” came from; yet the latter is what he supposedly is known as.
When I was working on a school libraries project (district automation), at one school where we were for several days the librarian was named Glynnis. I remarked to her that it was an unusual name, but I knew of one other person who had it, the actress Glynnis Johns. The librarian said yes in fact she was named after the actress, as her mother had been a major fan. But we didn’t know any same works she was in — on my part it was mostly the movie “No Highway in the Sky”.
I think of Robbie Coltrane for “Cracker” (a British crime series that could contend with “Prime Suspect” for establishing the British policier as a prestige genre for American audiences). But it seems he also is “known for” a Harry Potter role.
There’s a cheese called Gloucester. Is there a process that produces a First Gloucester, equivalent to an olive oil’s First Cold Pressing? Maybe?
I remember The Singing Detective and Joanne Whalley with her cream (for Gambon’s character’s psoriatic arthritis), but that was nearly 40 years ago! (My brother Anthony went on to direct Whalley in The Guilty (2000), with Bill Pullman).
I didn’t see Cracker, though I heard of it. Robbie Coltrane I think more of as a comedian working with other comic TV actors (also of the 1980s) like Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, and Rik Mayall. Most if not all of these people went on to become respected serious actors too.
The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies have recency as well as vast reach, of course. Dame Maggie Smith has done a lot more than appear in Downton Abbey and Potter). Daniel Craig has done a lot more than be James Bond – for instance playing nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg in 2002’s Copenhagen TV play. But I can guess what will be uppermost in their obits!
Glynnis Johns was in the little-known flick, “Mary Poppins”.
Yes, and there’s an interesting story behind that.
Seems she was asked to be in the film and she thought surely a leading lady like herself would be up for the titular role, when in actuality they wanted her for Mrs. Banks, a fairly minor character in the books. (By this time Glynnis was approaching 40.) Walt spoke with her and extolled how they were expanding the role for the film, why, they were even giving her a featured song! That got her interested enough, and Walt asked her to come back the next day so the Sherman Brothers could play the wonderful song they’d composed for her.
Then he went to the Sherman Brothers and told them he needed a song for Mrs. Banks by tomorrow.
Thinking fast, they took a song originally written to introduce Mary Poppins called “Practically Perfect” and repurposed it into “Sister Suffragette”. It was good enough to convince Glynnis.
“Gloucester” is pronounced “gloster”.
Worcester is “wooster” (as in ‘pussy’ not ‘goose’).
Leicester is “lester”.
And the rank below Captain in the army is pronounced “leftenunt”.
But as for cheese, there’s Single Gloucester and Double Gloucester.
@narmitaj
“My gravatar, if anyone is interested, is a set of photos from a 48-hr period in August 2020. I was already quite hairy and overdue a haircut when the pandemic started, and then grew a beard too.”
In the bottom left photo you bear quite a resemblance to Neil Morrissey.
But I must share a “degrees-of-separation” story, not because it is relevant, or even comic, but because it deserves it.
I read it in a letter to a newspaper some years ago, when there’d been a series of letters on d-o-s (presumably triggered by an article).
A man wrote of a story told to him by an elderly Aunt in the 1950s. She was from a background where people went to weekend house parties at grand/stately homes, when there were still lots in family hands. At one, as a young girl, she danced with an old Frenchman, and when the dance was over, he bent down and said “And now, ma enfant, you can tell people you have danced with a man who has danced with the Queen of France.”
He had been a pageboy at the court of Marie Antoinette.
@Kilby
“the whole point of the original work is that the men are not “falling” (and certainly not “raining”, as some idiot Wikipedian has suggested). They are just “there”.”
So might the pasta be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5aZJBLAu1E
@ MikeP – The “man who danced with the queen” anecdote sounds more unlikely than the (entirely true) story of the (still) living grandson of President John Tyler, who was born three and a half years before Marie Antoinette died. A comparison of dates shows that to make the dancing timeline work at all, one has to assume that both the pageboy and the (future) aunt were at a very young age when they danced with their respective partners (say, for example, ten), and that both of them managed to survive at least into their nineties:
a) 1755-1793 Marie Antoinette († age 37)
b) 1782-1872+ Page boy dancer (💃 age 10 in 1792; † age 90+)
c) 1862-1952+ Storytelling aunt (💃 age 10 in 1872; † age 90+)
While it seems improbable that a 36 year old Queen of France would dance in a twosome with a 10-year-old pageboy, a more likely assumption is that they could have been simultaneous participants in a large choreography on the same dance floor (for the sake of argument, in 1792, shortly before the abolition of the monarchy, but also several years after the Storming of the Bastille). The second dance (eighty years later, in 1872) requires a ninety year old man to dance with a ten year old girl, which seems even more unlikely, albeit again not entirely impossible. The bottom line is that the calendar cannot disprove this story with any certainty, but I sure would not bet any money on its validity.
The location drawn in the picture is Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA. Specifically, the “Red Rocks Conservation Area” (I live outside Boston.)
The dialog is a reference to “King Lear”. phsiii mentioned “advice” and that would come from the Earl of Kent, making the man a reference to him. The character Edgar was the *FIRST* son of the Earl of Gloucester.
I’m sorry, there are a lot of red rocks on the peninsula. I can’t be sure that the rocks scene depicted in the panel are actually within the “Red Rocks Conservation Area”, where I haven’t been in decades.
Thanks, Kevin!
It seems unfair to have a nationally syndicated cartoon reference a very local phenomenon. If that Gloucester was in a local paper by a local cartoonist, it would be easy to understand – I’ve seen puppies on the beach in Marblehead and other towns in the same area as Gloucester, and that is basically how they react. To me, it seems like just a wry slice-of-life observation.
But it doesn’t seem fair to do that for a national audience.
ianosmond: Agreed, but the cartoonist may not have realized just how local it is. I know that after over thirty years in Virginia, I still trip over occasional Canadianisms that I didn’t realize weren’t universal. (Latest was walking into liquor store and asking where I’d find a mickey of bourbon, which I needed for a recipe!)
Coming back this afternoon, I noticed that I was not as humble in my post as I’ve learned to be in conversation. I was very sleepy and when I read the comment that Gloucester, UK, was land-locked, my brain firmly said, “well ours isn’t.”
The view from the Red Rocks Conservation Area would look like drawn shoreline, with the hills.
However, I thought the rocks were red in the panel and, on second look they look more like they’re being lit with red light sunset. Red granite from that peninsula has been mined and delivered to places all through the Eastern U.S. Most of the rock around there was wrapped in the grey rock we’re used to. They chop of the grey rock and then slice the granite underneath.
That may all be done in the town of Rockport, which used to be part of Gloucester, at the end of the peninsula.
I think the dog is on a step [spelling?] from the tectonic upheaval.
(actually, Rockport, on the end of the peninsula, is where the granite is/was mined.)
Glynnis Johns was also in “Dear Brigette”, 1960s “Batman”, “Papa’s Delicate Condition” (a favorite of mine when young), 1960s “Around the World in 80 Days”, “The Court Jester” (Danny Kaye movie), “The Sword and the Rose” as princess Mary Tudor, “Murder, She Wrote”, “The Love Boat”, “Cheers” and – “The Glynis Johns Show”. Plus many other shows. These are just the shows which jump into my head.