Plenty of Nothing

Sturgeon

Source.

Plastic Sturgeon

Source.

Carp

The Hiroshima Carp Official Goods Shop keeps coming out with such good goods.

Japanese Word of the Day: Namazu

Pink Tentacle has a collection of namazu-e (earthquake catfish prints) here. Nineteenth-century Japanese popular culture attributed earthquakes to giant underground catfish. In this print a namazu is being petitioned by the various types of tradespeople who might profit from a quake. Those overlapping speech funnels are an interesting stab in the direction of modern speech balloons, and are not that different from the ribbons that flutter out of the mouths of the characters in eighteenth-century English political cartoons.

Carp!

 

North American sport is a jungle populated by lions, tigers, panthers and jaguars . . . and comparatively few fish.  Here in a poster promoting a Chiba Lotte Marines home game against the Hiroshima Toyo Carp we sense the destructive potential of koi.  Such a fish could . . . cause a lot of splashing.  Good thing the Marines are at hand.  See the full set here.