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.

 

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

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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Posted in Astronomy, Diners, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Physics, Science | Leave a Comment »

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 »

Tomatoes and spices and clams, oh my!

March 27, 2026

In my posting yesterday (3/26), “A fortuitous cold soup” Safeway’s house-brand tomato bisque combined with plenty of chopped clams (and some sriracha sauce for spiciness), served unheated (eventually, actually chilled): a (cold) clam-tomato bisque. With a bow to the movie The Wizard of Oz: tomatoes and spices and clams, oh my!

Which I will build up to by starting with bisques, and then running through

tomato juice, tomato soup, tomato bisque
clam juice, clam soup, clam bisque

and going on, at the urging of Tim Evanson on Facebook, to another meeting of clam with tomato, the commercial product Clamato, created as the basis for cocktails.

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Posted in Categorization and Labeling, Language and food | 1 Comment »

A fortuitous cold soup

March 26, 2026

Doing a regular grocery order yesterday,* the Safeway page for their excellent house-brand tomato bisque happened to show, among other things I’d ordered previously, small cans of chopped clams (which I used to use for pasta with white clam sauce, when I still actually cooked), and it occurred to me that I could combine the soup and the clams, with some sriracha sauce added for a bit of heat, mix it up, heat it in the microwave, and get myself some nice tomato-clam soup. (I don’t cook, but I microwave up a treat.)  [*If you kvetch about this example as a glaring dangling modifier, I will throw discourse-organizational stones at you, and try to educate you in the ways of non-default SPARs (subjectless predicational adjuncts requiring a referent for the subject — non-default when they don’t obey the Subject Rule, that is, when they don’t pick up this referent from the subject of the main clause; see the Page on this blog about my dangler postings here).]

I gave the spoon a lick to check the spiciness level. And found that it tasted wonderful, just as it was. It didn’t actually need heating. So I had it half of it for lunch, as a nice cold soup, and put the rest in the refrigerator, to produce a truly wonderful chilled soup for my lunch today. It might be nice with a bit of dill, maybe a dollop of sour cream, but I don’t have those in stock, so I was content with what I had.

And I got a nice, botanically oriented, walk around the block with Isaac, answered mail reconnecting with my old friend the philosopher Bill Lycan (see my 3/12 posting “The Vishnu of philosophy”), and then (for dinner) scored some bibimbap from a Korean restaurant, just because I was seized with a desire for it. An excellent day.

 

Posted in Danglers, Discourse organization, Friendship, Language and food, Modification, My life | Leave a Comment »

Bottoming, literally and figuratively

March 25, 2026

(well, yes, deeply about sex between men, considered analytically but described in the most direct street language, so entirely inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest)

Today’s topic combines the interests of my two previous postings

— on 3/24, “Luke Adams and the power bottoms of the pre-pandemic days”

— on 3/25, “The power of the normative gender binary”

and introduces as a side theme one of the overarching ideas of my work in both gender & sexuality studies and linguistics, that of pervasive variety / variability.

— as slogans: There are a great many homosexualities | There are a great many masculinities

Along the way, we’ll engage with four great bottoms from gay porn: Tannor Reed, Johnny Rapid, Kevin Wiles, and Trent Atkins.

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Posted in Effeminacy, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, Variation | Leave a Comment »

The power of the normative gender binary

March 25, 2026

From my 3/19/26 posting “Annals of derogation: homo”:

fairy-boy was the primary verbal abuse directed (inexplicably) at me in childhood, along with (equally inexplicable) accusations that I wanted to be a girl

The abuse was inexplicable to me when I was a kid, but though I was a canny child, there were ways of the world I did not yet appreciate, and among them was the power of the normative gender binary — whatever deviates from normative masculinity is necessarily feminine (and therefore unacceptable in a male person). Some material from this blog on the subject …

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »

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