Overnegation strikes the USPS

July 3, 2026

In today’s mail, a big card from the United States Postal Service; the crucial sentence is bold-faced:

Official Change-Of-Address Validation
The Postal Service has received a Change-Of-Address order asking us to forward mail from this address for ARNOLD MELCHIOR ZWICKY …
The Postal Service utilizes two-factor authentification to verify Change-Of-Address requests. The purpose of this notification is to provide additional opportunity to confirm this request to forward mail is correct.

If you are not ARNOLD MELCHIOR ZWICKY no further action is required.

If the person listed did not ask the Postal Service to forward their mail, please dispute this Change-Of-Address [details of dispute schemes follow]

It could hardly be clearer from the context that the bold-faced sentence should read:

If you are ARNOLD MELCHIOR ZWICKY no further action is required.

(Well, if you are ARNOLD MELCHIOR ZWICKY and you intended to submit a Change-Of-Address order. It’s a genuinely complex situation; there are people who attempt to harm and harass others by filing malicious Change-Of-Address orders.)

 

 

 

Posted in Negation, Semantics | 1 Comment »

National days 2

July 3, 2026

Yesterday — in my posting “National days”, a Peruvian (delivering food to my house) celebrated US Independence Day on my behalf:

My dinner for June 27 was delivered by a courier bubbling over in delight about the coming Fourth of July, which he identified as my national day (adding that he was Peruvian and his national days came at the end of July…)

In the posting, I played things the way the courier framed them and didn’t appreciate that he was probably also full of delight in America’s liberation day on his own behalf. Meanwhile the news was just coming in that the US government had launched a hugely expanded program of detention and deportation affecting many groups, including Latinos / Hispanics of all sorts — making a decidedly bitter day of liberty for all.

And now today. Another food delivery, brought to me by Jaime, a courier new to me, Mexican I think. Who also bubbled over in smiles, then stood smartly to attention, and gave me a proper military salute. As a representative of my (in his eyes) wonderful country. Of which I am now deeply ashamed.

I did not burst into bitter tears, there’s a triumph. I considered offering him namaste as the only imaginable gesture of peace, humility, and respect for him, but realized it was probably alien to him.  Settled for a bow to him and heartfelt thanks. I couldn’t do a salute, it’s way too military.

I should have stood back up and recited my Credo, the text I committed to heart long before we had to study it in school, committed to memory because I am a true child of the Enlightenment; while I came to a personal understanding of great wickedness early in my life, I was also given this gift of ideas:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

You must understand that in the context, all men conveyed ‘all people’ — but beyond that I choose to take this declaration of belief at face value, to let the wonderful words shine through.

 

Posted in Holidays, Language and politics, My life | Leave a Comment »

National days

July 2, 2026

My dinner for June 27 was delivered by a courier bubbling over in delight about the coming Fourth of July, which he identified as my national day (adding that he was Peruvian and his national days came at the end of July — surprising details below). I suppressed my complex reservations about American Independence Day (some of which I will unload later) and chose not to add that we were at the eve of one of my people’s celebratory days — Stonewall Day, June 28 (the tank top I was wearing had a rainbow flag on it) — though I did point to my gym shorts, whose white cross on red is in fact the Swiss flag, adding that Swiss national day was coming in August (August 1, to be precise). I didn’t develop the theme of my absurd pride in the remnants of Swissness that cling to me, most especially the egalitarian, aristocrat-free ideals the federation has espoused since the original alliance was formed in 1291, over 7 centuries ago; there is nothing like it in all of Europe.

After he left, I checked out the Fiestas Patrias peruanas, or Peruvian National Holidays, which officially are celebrations of Peru’s independence from the Spanish Empire (Wikipedia entry here), but in fact have become an entire holiday season, in character very much like the secular Christmas season (at, however, the end of July). It sounds delightful.

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Posted in Flags, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Homosexuality, Music, My life, Race and ethnicity, Signs and symbols, Switzerland and Swiss things | Leave a Comment »

Mononga Hela!

July 1, 2026

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit, the sultry bunnies of July! But they are no match for Mononga Hela, the monstrous snake that swallows fat Carnegie melons, prodigious feral boars, and of course entire railway trains whole — the fearsome creature that in popular lore is said to have consumed all of western Pennsylvania in a fit of pique. Mononga Monga Ooga Gila Hellmouth!

But first, the Zippy strip from 6/27:


Beyond spelling: Zippy appreciates the power of the name Monongahela; and of course potrzebie, but the word for the day is Monongahela

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Posted in Events and occasions, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Mantras, Names, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »

We believe

June 30, 2026

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger to bring June to a close, anticipating the hot summer rabbits of July

In the days of the Arnold and Isaac Seminars on Belief that have animated my Ramona St. condo in recent months — Isaac’s a deeply pious fundamentalist Fijian Christian and I’m an amiable non-believer, with an excellent early life in mainstream, socially progressive American Lutheran and Episcopal churches — every so often we hit a note that resonates deeply for both of us. In my 6/24 posting “Jesus pyjamas, and a sweatshirt”, we discovered that we both found the parable of the lost sheep (told in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke) particularly moving.

A bit before this, I astounded Isaac by being able to (still) reel off great chunks of the Nicene Creed from memory, but broke up at one point in an excess of emotion over two words. And discovered that Isaac thought those two words were in fact the point of the creed, a distillation of transcendent faith in unseen marvels. Underlined in the extract below (there are variations in the text, so this might not be exactly as you remember it; and remember that this is a translation into English):

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Posted in Events and occasions, Language and religion, My life | Leave a Comment »

Day by day

June 30, 2026

Difficult night last night. Slept uneasily from 6:30 only to 2:10, and with a substantial break in the middle. Took a levothyroxine tab, then needed to wait an hour before eating breakfast. Fresh news: results of the blood test for TB — an absolute legal requirement for admission to a living community — had come in, negative as expected, so everything can go forward. Meanwhile, I spent the time marking still more things (like wastebaskets and power cords) as to be moved and others as not to be. (It’s hard to look at familiar things with fresh eyes; familiar things become background, unremarked.)

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Posted in Holidays, My life | Leave a Comment »

Briefly noted: moving day

June 28, 2026

Things rush on. The move from my Palo Alto condo (which Jacques and I moved into almost 40 years ago) to an independent living suite at The Avant of Palo Alto is scheduled to start at 8:30 am on Wednesday July 8th. Very complex preparations: what gets moved (a small select amount); versus what stays (a monumental pile of stuff), to be disposed of by the family phalanx over some period of time. This is not your standard moving experience.

I have been more clearly marking the two sets of things, which is tedious and (despite the fact that I’ve been getting rid of most of my possessions for roughly a year now — an experience that wounds me emotionally, afresh, every day) continues to bring me low. All I can say is that the end of this period is in sight, to be replaced by the shocks and confusions of the new.

(Thanks to my labors, I have totally missed the celebrations of Stonewall Day. All I can say is that events have brought me lots of Michelle and Barack Obama, who represent the best of us and the best in us and continue to provide hope in some truly dark times.)

 

 

Posted in My life | 3 Comments »

A Night in Tunisia 2

June 27, 2026

Briefly noted. From my posting yesterday (6/26) “Enjoy your night in Tunisia”, in response to Lise Menn, a comment about:

the music; I wanted to open up “A Night in Tunisia”, encourage people to discover the early [Dizzy] Gillespie-[Charlie] Parker collaborations, maybe to go on to discover that words got added to it [more than once, in fact] and it was eventually performed and recorded by almost every jazz or just jazzy vocalist(s) there is (Ella did it, Manhattan Transfer did it) and that most of that is in fact fabulous, genuinely a precious part of our cultural heritage

As it happens, this has been a dire day for my spirit, filled with such intense anxiety about the worth of my work that I was reduced to reading through old postings, looking for examples of things I wrote that might have been of value to at least a few of my readers. The triggers for this despair were multiple, but it turned out that sleep deprivation was high on the list; life is considerably better after three one-hour naps.

Then I went back to Ella Fitzgerald, a deep pleasure since I saw her perform live back in the 1960s.

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Posted in Music, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

Enjoy your night in Tunisia

June 26, 2026

The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip of 6/26:


(#1) He’s a good man, who’ll give you hot licks on his saxophone while lavishing care on your car during your dinner; enjoy your night in Tunisia, light on the harissa (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

A complex joke pun on the name of the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (Wikipedia entry here), in which the Charlie Brown character from the comic strip Peanuts is presented as a valet parker.

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Posted in Jokes, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Puns | 3 Comments »

Going down on Rosh Hashanah

June 26, 2026

(fellatial fun — and disrespectful of religion as well — so not for kids or the sexually modest)

Yesterday on the Facebook group soc-motss (for same-sex-inclined folk and their friends), Ellen Evans forwarded a 6/24 FB posting from Derekh Baruch Von Geiger on Facebook:


The ultimate source for this image is not identified; it could just be an invention, but it looks like a Christian church service borrowing from Jewish practices, in particular what’s customarily translated into English as the blowing of the shofar

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Posted in Jokes, Language and religion, Language and the body, Language of sex, Language play, Metaphor, Puns, Taboo language and slurs | 3 Comments »

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