Three nights on the hormonal rollercoaster

March 4, 2026

A journal of the nights of 3/1-2, 3/2-3, and (last night!) 3/3-4, during which I experienced the deepest lows and the greatest highs of hormone-driven states of being.

Meanwhile, somehow, the rest of life went on: washing up, getting my meals, ordering groceries and household supplies, mourning the deaths of old friends and admirable people, seeing doctors, getting exercise, scheduling appointments, writing blog postings, singing, fretting (pointlessly) about being completely uprooted and moved to an assisted living facility, getting income tax materials together, keeping in touch with friends (especially those in crisis or grieving, but just to renew connections going back as far as the 1940s), trying to recollect my work and activities in the 1960s (as intellectual history now potentially of significance), fending off assaults on me as an icon of DEI, answering e-mail, all while trying somehow to cope with the state of the world, which seems threatening to degrees once unimaginable, and in the face of grievous memory losses that will take months of labor to recover from (at the moment I am damaged goods, with a somewhat fried brain).

The three nights, expanding on notes I made at the time. (My memory for new things is very unsteady, so that I write stuff down. Then I have a huge pile of notes in which I have to find whatever it is that I need. So I have to try to remember where the relevant notes are. It’s all vexing, leading me to weep in frustration. But I persevere.) Read the rest of this entry »

You just don’t know that you don’t know

March 3, 2026

The phenomenon, from Wikipedia:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. The term may also describe the tendency of high performers to underestimate their skills. It was first described by the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is sometimes misunderstood as claiming that people with low intelligence are generally overconfident, instead of describing the specific overconfidence of people unskilled at particular areas.

As then in my mail recently, as a benefit of my being a member of the American Academy: “Why Do Fools Think They Are Wise? Should the Wise Believe Themselves to Be the Fool?” (a conversation between new American Academy member David Dunning and Academy President Laurie L. Patton about the Dunning-Kruger effect), Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Winter 2026, pp. 44-57.

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Hung with drugs

March 2, 2026

(Firmly located in men’s crotches and inclined to silliness, though without the bodyparts illustrated and without the street talk — so clearly not to everyone’s taste)

From WOIO tv channel 19 in Shaker Heights OH (serving the Cleveland area as a CBS affiliate — covering news, weather, sports, and a ton of racy / raunchy content): a report on a guy whose impressive genital package turned out to be a huge stash of narcotics, inspiring me to some musical silliness on Facebook.

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My hedge is a blood-headed beautiful man

March 1, 2026

Out in my walker recently, getting some exercise, accompanied by my helper Isaac, showing him places in the neighborhood (with some history of those places) and opening up the landscape around us by identifying plants, giving him their names (common and taxonomic) and explaining plant families, showing him the scents of the plants, their structures, and how they are used in the neighborhood streets and gardens. From little ground-cover plants to the huge coast redwoods that tower above us. What was once just background becomes a rich, engaging tapestry, full of things to see and talk about.

Isaac has a keen eye for detail and tons of curiosity, and he brings a rich and astonishing life history to our walks: to start with, he’s Fijiian (his native language turns out to be jam-packed with interest for the linguist: its word-order type is the rare VOS, and it has a fabulously intricate suite of personal pronouns).

There’s much more to say, but on to a very specific puzzle from our walk a few days ago, which took us past a number of privacy hedges made from a plant I don’t recall ever having noticed before, but was inescapable because it was covered with bright-red spiky flowers:


The plant in question, growing as a small shrub (photo from the Cambridge University Botanical Garden website )

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My accomplishment for 2/25

February 27, 2026

My signal accomplishment for this day was an hour of singing Sacred Harp hymns along with the wonderful YouTube videos of All-Ireland Sacred Harp conventions of years past. Eventually, I’ll celebrate just one song, SH276 Bridgewater, which is such a favorite that it has on occasion triggered my slipping into a state of ecstasy.

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Toys, potatoes, and dogs

February 26, 2026

The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip for 2/25: Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead with their Potatohead dog:


The toy: Mr. Potatohead and his detachable-bodypart family; the potato: the russet; the dog: the Jack Russell terrier (note russet as a potato-pun on the dog name Russell) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)

To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize it as an instance of the potatohead cartoon meme, based on the toy. Now, some details.

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How long is it?

February 25, 2026

This is, first of all and primarily, the announcement of a dissertation oral presentation in Stanford’s Department of Linguistics:

The role of syntactic structure, contextual information, and supra-contextual information in durational patterns of words in spontaneous spoken English by Tony Velasquez 

on Monday, March 9, 2026, 10:00am-11:15am, in Wallenberg Hall, Room 124. Committee: Arto Anttila (advisor), Robert Podesva, Dan Jurafsky, Katherine Hilton, and Tanya M. Luhrmann (Professor of Anthropology serving as University Chair); the format for this open part of the oral exam is a 30-45 minute talk by the PhD candidate followed by questions from those attending, for a total of no more than 75 minutes.

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Tell us their story!

February 25, 2026

(Underwear models displaying their bodies, with allusions to various forms of intense man-on-man sex, so not to everyone’s taste)

A Daily Jocks sale ad in my email today (2/25):


[ad text:] Cellblock13 at Daily Jocks — buy 2 & save 30%

What sort of dramatic relationship from the world of the butch faggy — Red Guy and Blue Guy, resplendent in their gorgeous intense colors — is illustrated here? Tell us their story!

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The megalomania of a small penis

February 24, 2026

(Well, all about penises and what men think about their own and other guys’, so edgy for many people — but mostly clinical in content and tone, not at all raunchy)

Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine strip of  2/24, about what we might call little-dick grandiosity — the common belief that megalomania is (in general) a compensation for having a small penis:


There is in fact no evidence for this idea; and we might legitimately question whether there are any actual cases of little-dick grandiosity, as I put it so crudely above, at all

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Dear Ed

February 23, 2026

Reprinted on Facebook recently by Jeff Bowles, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon from 11/3/1988, in which Snoopy the writer upbraids an editor — someone I think of as the powerful but irrationally unappreciative son-of-a-bitch Ed — for failing to print his stories and make him rich and famous:

Me, I share with Snoopy a history — in my case, long past — of having my articles callously rejected by Ed. I did not seek riches, though I was happy to get some royalties from my writing; the currency of academia isn’t financial but reputational: having an audience for my ideas and my creative writing.

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