September 1, 2026
(bodily unpleasantness, much of it in street language, so likely to be offensive to many readers)
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for terminal August; send in the rabbits of September, and we can marvel (with Stephen Sondheim) Isn’t it rich? / Isn’t it queer? — that we should come to this time of the year
Yes, this is getting out a day late, but I have an excuse. It’s both painful to hear about — involving 12 hours of excruciating pain for me — and deeply revolting — well, literally shitty — so I’m having trouble framing the story for you. Then, as a kind of ghastly sideshow, various pieces of essential software (Facebook is mostly to blame) simply stopped working as they should, making it impossible for me to make my blog postings available through FB. All together, giving the Lost Day of 8/31.
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Posted in Events and occasions, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and the body, My life, Stories | Leave a Comment »
September 1, 2026
On Facebook (substantially edited down): Horton Copperpot on 8/26, with this lead-in to a longer piece:
— HC: We all know AI slop. TikTok is branching out into a bunch of areas, including shopping and “short dramas”, which is a bit different from the original medium. It’s AI-generated soap operas that seem to follow between 3 and 5 script matrices, with some variation in focus, setting and language. The main feature is the ability to monetize them with high efficiency, much like most “free” video games on your phone. Several of them pop up in Facebook Reelz as ads for several “short drama” platforms, with some of the feature “dramas” shared between them. I found several that cross these platforms, mostly Horatio-Alger-type fantasy plots, plus a few cheap romance novelettes.
I got interested in them a while ago, not for the “drama” or visual appeal but more for the recurring plot lines that indicate laziness and greed. The other aspect that intrigued me was just how bad the AI was in keeping track of the details.
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Posted in Academic life, AI, Categorization and Labeling, Compliments, Plays, Pragmatics, Social interactions, Social life, Stories | Leave a Comment »
September 1, 2026
8/31 e-mail from me to Li Li, “senior executive director at Palo Alto Commons and The Avant” (lightly edited):
Talking with you briefly about your path from China to Palo Alto brought back a gigantic flood of memories of my teaching at what was then the Beijing Language Institute in 1985 (under a program of country exchanges of college professors — I was exchanged by Fang Li of BLI, and then sponsored his time a bit later at Stanford).
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Posted in Chinese, My life, Social class, Stereotyping, Teaching | Leave a Comment »
September 1, 2026
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for September, in the middle of another run of AZ-connected birthdays (not of famous people, however admirable; but of (still living) people who are important to me): 8/27 Ken Rudolph of soc.motss (85); 8/30 Ellen Sulkis James, a long-ago companion of mine on the staff of the Reading (PA) Eagle (86); 8/31 Benita Bendon Campbell, dear friend since Princeton in the 1960s and my connection to the late Ann Daingerfield (Zwicky) (90); 9/2 Mike Jankulak of soc.motss (57); and 9/6, yes, me (86)
9/1 came to me with a morning name: The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys — from what experiential or mental source I know not. But with a shiver of delight.
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Posted in Events and occasions, Friendship, Morning names, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »
August 30, 2026
(all the way at the end, we get to some sexual street talk, which I think has exactly the right shock value for its context; but if s*cking c*ck offends you, skip the next-to-last sentence)
It starts with Steven Levine — a sparkling vehicle of joy, enthusiasm, and congeniality — roused to anger and protest, as I reported in the 8/3 posting “Two notes on gay moral purpose”:
SL breaks out in a combination of, on the one hand, genuine pride in occasions of humane concern and (to put it grandly) moral purpose in the gay world and, on the other, righteous anger at a long-standing tradition in psychology, sociology, and medicine of blanketly treating homosexuality as dysfunction and disease. With, as sideshow, celebration of the raw sexuality in homosexuality — recognizing the physical and emotional pleasures of the associated sexual practices — in the wonderful BIG FAG t-shirts created by Steven (which he’d been distributing with abandon at Amsterdam Pride).
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Moral worlds, Music, My life, Poetry, Social interactions, Social life | Leave a Comment »
August 30, 2026
(images that aren’t actually XXX-rated, but get as close to the line as possible while serving WordPress modesty — so some readers may choose to avert their eyes)
Briefly noted. For charging up the senses — big jolts for someone of my inclinations — on a quiet Sunday, Daily Jocks has sent out a mailer ad for thongs this morning (8/30) celebrating the male body as sexual object, close up, fore and aft:
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Phallicity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
August 29, 2026
Swimming pool. Callipygian young man climbing out of it. David Hockney’s California dream. The painting:
(#1) Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool
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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Music, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »
August 29, 2026
Also elegantly minimal. Yesterday’s (8/25) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon:
An Etch A Sketch drawing of an Escher drawing; /ɛšǝ(r)/ Escher (rhotic for me, not for most BrE speakers) vs. /ɛčǝ/ Etch A, so primarily, fricative vs. affricate at same point of articulation (as in sheep vs. cheap or wish vs. witch) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 — see this Page)
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Posted in Art, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Paradoxes, Puns, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »
August 27, 2026
Now, there’s a mouthful.
From Mike Pope, mail on 7/24/26 about how I sorted the books in my new apartment (described in
my posting that day on “Sorting”):
— MP > AZ: Would you describe your system as intertwingular?
— AZ > MP: The short answer is yes, but I didn’t have the concept or the label for it until you asked the question. So, thank you.
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Posted in Classification and labeling, Lexical semantics, Portmanteaus, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »
August 27, 2026
Journalist Alex Wagner on MS NOW a little while ago:
We are so beclowning ourselves
(The intensive Gen-X so is just a bonus; AW was born in 1977, and Gen-X is roughly 1965 through 1980)
That’s beclown ‘make a fool of’ (perhaps clumsily). With a modest number of cites to be found, but uncommon enough to strike many hearers as a colorful coinage.
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Posted in Age, Connotation, Derivation, Lexical semantics | 1 Comment »
