Travels with Joey

April 5, 2026

(thoroughly unacceptable for kids and the sexually modest)

Or: The swains in Spain  / Are effing profane.

A posting on the occasion of my scoring my own copy of the gay porn romp Joey’s Surf Vacation (MEN.com, 2024), in which twink Joey Mills travels to Spain to learn to surf, but ends up mostly with endless sex  — manual, oral, and anal, both giving and getting — instead of endless summer (though a certain amount of surfing does occur)

JSV provides me with more material for a standard Sunday custom: playing familiar gay porn as background while I work on assembling postings, staying mildly aroused and alert. I realize that this isn’t most people’s idea of a pleasant Sunday morning, but it works for me, and doesn’t get in anybody’s way. (It’s much less noisy than my shapenote singing, which is truly loud, but hasn’t elicited any complaints from the neighbors.)

So here’s the program: reports on three postings on this blog about JSV, with some fresh additions. And then a few notes on Thomas Johnson, aka Mr / Mister DeepVoice / Deep Voice.

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Living tubes, no sex

April 4, 2026

Walking the neighborhood with Isaac brought us to resting by a planter of weird plants — tall, stiff, hollow tubes in sections, living green things with no hint of flowers or seeds — outside Joe and the Juice at 240 Hamilton Ave. (at Ramona St., a block and a half from my house).  I noted how tough the plants were (with some moisture, they grow ferociously, and their stems are naturally coated with silica, so that the stems can actually be used to scour pots and pans).  Unfortunately, I forgot the evocative names of the plant — common name horsetail, botanical name Equisetum (Latin for ‘horse bristle’) — or the significant fact that the plants had neither flowers nor seeds because (like ferns) they were modern plants surviving in much the same form as their ancestors from prehistoric times, before the invention of sex in plants, and produced spores rather than seeds.

An impressive stand, in the wild, of the species Isaac and I rested by at Joe and the Juice, Equisetum hyemale:


The prehistoric plants included gigantic horsetail trees

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Posted in Language and plants, My life, Names, Palo Alto, Taxonomic vs. common | Leave a Comment »

Maximus

April 3, 2026

(alcoholic drinks and lots of condoms, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

I put in a grocery order for delivery from Safeway (a bag of mandarins, 2 containers of yogurt, 2 cartons of milk, 4 boxes of Kleenex, and some Dijon mustard), and Safeway suggested a pile of additions to my order, the first of which came as the word MAXIMUS, which my highly penis-invested imagination took as a reference to condoms, huge ones (no doubt as a compliment to the power of my body; for the purposes of sales, every man is admirably horse-hung, whatever his actual equipment is like). As it happens, I am happily snug — salestalk for small / slim — rather that max / thick, congenial rather than showy, but I’m entertained by the gesture.

But it turned out that MAXIMUS was an allusion to max taste, not max size — specifically to the powerful taste of an ale, Lagunitas Maximus Colossal IPA. Safeway was encouraging me to order some. Or Mad Dog Bling Blue Razz blend raspberry wine. Or Absolut Tabasco — chili pepper flavored vodka. (I swear I am not making these up.) There were probably further remarkable alcoholic drinks on succeeding pages, but I did not venture further into this astounding catalog. In fact, I was falling back on visions of snug but silky condoms. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Taste | 1 Comment »

The contrary opinion

April 2, 2026

In the spirit of the Passover season, a Frank Cotham cartoon in the 4/6/26 issue of the New Yorker:


A gentle jab at the stereotypical Jewish inclination to public disputation, alluding to the saying two Jews, three opinions or three Jews, four opinions

Even Moses, parting the waters of the sea (to enable the Israelites to escape the Egyptians pursuing them) was not immune from second guessing, at least in Cotham’s telling (though the event somehow escaped recording in the Pentateuch).

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Occasions

March 31, 2026

This is ultimate March: 🐅 tiger 🐅 tiger 🐅 tiger, as the inaugural rabbits of April mass for April Fool’s Day, Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday, and this year at sundown tomorrow, the first day of Passover, as Good Friday and Easter Sunday are soon upon us; today is the Transgender Day of Visibility, fitting most uncomfortably with what has been, for some years now, Cesar Chavez Day — which I now choose to celebrate as Dolores Huerta Day (you might have an alternative proposal).

So the calendar brings us a contended landscape of some of the best and the worst in humankind, along with the landscape of the daily news, which supplies some of the most appalling reports alongside some of the most heartening.  Meanwhile, the mechanics of daily life have not gone well for me; most notably, my internet access vanished for most of yesterday; and dips into very low barometric pressure have made my joints scream with pain.  But I endure. And tomorrow is another month.

 

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Stained by poppies

March 30, 2026

Going past me yesterday morning, a tv ad for some remedy for, as I heard it, teeth stained by poppies (and other foods).

Yes, coffee. With blueberries, black tea, and red wine, a classic offender against dental whiteness. Granting that I have /a/ (in addition to /ɔ/)  as an alternative accented vowel in coffee, poppies is a complex but phonologically unsurprising mishearing; coffee and poppies are in fact excellent half-rhymes / imperfect rhymes:

My morning coffee
By a field of poppies

(with two feature rhymes, both well-attested — (initial) p for k and (medial) p for f — plus a subsequence rhyme, with the final z of poppies against the absence of a final consonant in coffee; for the terminology, see my 1976 Chicago Linguistic Society paper “Well, this rock and roll has got to stop. Junior’s head is hard as a rock.”, available on-line here)

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Posted in Errors, Language and plants, Language play, Mishearings, My life, Poetry | 4 Comments »

Sushi Sinaloa

March 29, 2026

Last night’s food-delivery surprise came through an offer on the Grubhub delivery service: for El Camaron RWC in Redwood City — which provides seafood dishes from the state of Sinaloa, plus tacos and (surprise!) Mexican-style sushi (the menu has a Sushi Sinaloa section). I went for the Mexican Japanese items: an aguachile roll and Sinaloa sashimi. Just fabulous, with enough left over for at least one more meal.

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Posted in Language and food, Mexico, Spanish | 3 Comments »

The routine tasks of a vengeful God

March 28, 2026

From the latest New Yorker issue, of 3/30/26, this cartoon by Daniel Kanhai:


The energetic angelic figure of Moses, with his rather dubious angelic assistant (his brother Aaron? his successor Joshua? just an angel off some random cloud, pressed involuntarily into the frog toss?), lobs jumbo frogs down onto the Egyptians, meting out punishment to them for their Pharaoh’s offenses against the Lord and the Lord’s chosen people, the Israelites

It’s the Biblical second Plague of Egypt — not the disastrous swarming frogs of the book of Exodus, overwhelming entire cities, doomed to die in great stinking heaps; but instead adorable, perky frogs from children’s books and the cartoons (surely they are a pretty green). Moses gets them by the barrel.

In any case, the incongruity of the appalling — literally Godawful — frogs from Exodus and the cute frogs in the New Yorker made me laugh out loud.

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Posted in Humor, Language and animals, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »

The black service window in space

March 28, 2026

In yesterday’s (3/27) Zippy strip, our Pinhead recognizes a dark service window in a generic roadside fast food place as an astronomical black hole:


(#1) Zippy between two worlds, ordering food in space

Two things: the service window; the black hole.

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Countermanic Baroque

March 27, 2026

E-mail from Ellen Kaisse this morning, for the annals of mishearing:

— EK > AZ: I got all bent out of shape this morning when I thought I heard an ad for a prescription drug called Vivaldi. How dare they appropriate the name of a beloved Baroque composer? Further investigation revealed that it is called Lybalvi.

— AZ > EK:  Lovely. With you, I am offended on Vivaldi’s behalf.

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Posted in Errors, Mishearings, Music | Leave a Comment »

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